Visual Album Review: The Case for "Endless"
A Retrospective of Frank Ocean’s Sleeper Masterpiece
By Carter Fife
It has been almost three years since hip-hop’s most elusive and mysterious artist Frank Ocean released two very highly anticipated albums after years of delays and silence. After releasing both the visual album Endless and the more traditional Blonde, commercial publications gave an enormous amount of attention to the latter, picking apart every detail, lyric and guest appearance, while the former went widely under the radar, despite all the controversy it created. Although the hype quickly settled for Endless, Blonde would continue to make headlines countless times over the following year due to Ocean omitting it for Grammy consideration, media outlets praising it as one of the (if not the) best albums of the year, or the myriad of comparisons other contemporary hip-hop, pop, and r&b albums received to Blonde. When comparing the magnitude of exposure both of Ocean’s 2016 works received, it is clear that Endless was vastly unappreciated.
Although intentionally released in an inaccessible format designed to make as little money as possible, Endless is both an auditory and visual masterpiece whose skillfully mastered and arranged tracks parallel its wildly more successful sister album Blonde. Despite Ocean re-releasing the studio-quality version of Endless in early 2018 via CD’s, Cassettes, DVD’s and vinyls, it still remains relatively difficult to consume. With around 20 or so individual tracks (the number varies depending who you ask) Endless is a 45 minute album accompanying visuals of Frank Ocean in a warehouse constructing a spiral staircase. The media has had so many questions about almost every aspect of the piece, and almost all of them have gone unanswered.
The album begins a fragment of the track Device Control, whose vocals (delivered by German Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans) slowly peer out from the static ambience to briefly dwell on the devices we use in our contemporary lives and the control they have over us, and the formation of a dualism existing with our perceived reality by ‘blurring the line between still and motion [picture]’ (though that line comes at the end of the album, when the song is played in its entirety). Then the album quickly transitions into an airy and soulful rendition of Aaliyah’s At Your Best (You Are Love), which itself is a cover of the Isley Brother’s hit of a similar name. Although a cover of this song was previously released on Ocean’s tumblr in 2015, the version that appears on Endless is much more fleshed out and features more string and vocal sections towards the end of the track. After Ocean gives you a brief moment of silence for you to wipe away your tears, he launches into Alabama, featuring the likes of both Sampha and Jazmine Sullivan. It is on this track that we are first exposed to a narrative device that is utilized many times on this album, overlapping vocal tracks mixed almost identically. Frank Ocean delivers on this track, tugging at the listener’s heartstrings with lyrics like ‘What can I do to love you, / more than I do now?’. The track transitions into a brief interlude entitled Mine where Ocean employs several vocal tracks to repeat the lines ‘How come the ecstasy depresses me so? Chemically I don’t have no more new places to go.’ to the point at which they are almost inaudible. All the while, Frank Ocean continues to saw away, constructing his staircase.
It is at this point that the album begins to take a turn stylistically. Five tracks in, U-N-I-T-Y is the first song to feature any sort of percussion. On this track Ocean laments on the loyalty and fame he experiences despite wanting to keep a low profile. Ambience 001: In A Certain Way is an eight second interlude featuring Crystal LaBeija speaking in the 1968 film The Queen, a film that remains a source of pride for people in the LGBT community, Ocean included. The next track, Comme des Garçons, is one where Ocean details the fleeting, temporary nature of life and love before transitioning into Ambience 002: Honeybaby, A song that features Ocean crying out softly (almost sweetly? Like a Honey-Baby? Genius) before singing a short four-bar intermission and delivering the line ‘like holidays I get off on you’. Truly an exemplary linguistic feat, one that is both lighthearted and casual, almost intended to let one’s guard down before Wither.
On Wither Ocean describes a love he shares with another, and hoping that his children get to see both the purity of love that he has, and the life that he lives (and will continue to live). He also simultaneously notes that people tend to romanticize things that happen in the past, their memories acting as catalysts to saturate emotions they may not have even felt, though Ocean assures the listener that he felt a legitimate love when he was young, and that it’s more common than one might expect. Ocean quickly transitions to Hublots, a short and simple track expressing Ocean’s preference for a low-key life rather than one of fame and glamour, before moving on to the next track In Here Somewhere. Containing a very sizable sample from Daft Punk’s Contact, the track purely just demonstrates the importance the loving the person you’re with.
Next is the track Slide On Me (mixed by SebastAn, no less), featuring once again two overlapping vocal tracks and a basic guitar and drum pattern to accompany it. In this song Ocean details how he is frequently there for another despite the fact that emotion may not be constantly reciprocated. There is also a version that was released last spring featuring the cultural icon Young Thug. The track perfectly transitions into Sideways, where Ocean describes the state of being sideways (between up and down) as a metaphor for a litany of things: mental state, social status, his sexuality, being alive, etc. It is this grey area that is described in many ways on multiple other songs on the album, all the while Frank Ocean paints and assembles his large spiral staircase.
Florida, which follows Sideways, is a very peaceful and cathartic arrangement of many different vocalists. After a minute and a half, the track changes to Deathwish (ASR), one of the most touching songs on the album, describing a relationship that is left to the mercy of the other while they both fall asleep angry. This song is also symbolic for being in an altered state and leaving oneself at the mercy of god as they doze to sleep, perhaps for the last time. ASR itself is a reference to the system that most automobiles have to reduce the amount of wheel slipping when uncontrollable sliding is detected. The next two tracks, Rushes and Rushes To are both tracks that have Ocean using rushes in a myriad of different metaphors while detailing a particularly difficult relationship. Higgs is a nicely self-reflective song, where we find Ocean in a moment of reflection thinking about his choices in love, in his professional life, and the ways in which he lives his life, singing ‘What is we decided to live by choice? / All this time I knew / That average was something to fall back on after genius ends’. The penultimate track Mitsubishi Sony features a playful Ocean rapping over a trap-esque instrumental and analog synths while in the video, he slowly but surely finishes his staircase and makes his way before the final step..
And he’s back where he started. In the empty black and white warehouse surrounded by workbenches and construction equipment, with a set of speakers in the corner. The video resumes just the same as it had in the very beginning, as Device Control begins to play once more, but this time the song is much longer and the latter parts of it feature a very heavy percussion track, and the sounds accompanying it resembling a very old but somehow modern techno aesthetic, while Tillmans’ vocals croon on about livestreaming your life and the contradiction of the concept of an instant social media that simultaneously removes us from our surroundings. Then, as quickly as it started, Endless is over, and we are left confused and vaguely emotional.
Although it has been almost three years since its release, the importance of Endless within the larger narrative of modern music cannot be understated, especially in relation to 2016’s Blonde. Each theme that is approached in Blonde is fully fleshed out in Endless, with topics like substance abuse, unrequited love, fame, exposure, expectations, and our individual roles in society being analyzed through a lens of duality, understanding that each concept is much more beyond black and white. The visual album is full of things that everyone can enjoy, and Ocean stays true to his older self by hiding little easter eggs everywhere on the album, such as sampling a menu sound from Super Smash Bros Melee (reminiscent of the samples on 2011’s nostalgia, ULTRA). The visual aspect of this album is one that many would deem unnecessary, as its main use in Ocean’s creative direction was likely largely dictated by Ocean’s desire to make Def Jam as little money as possible.
Years later, this album is still just as awe-inspiring as it was when first shown to thousands of desperate eyes glued to a computer screen, anxiously awaiting the return of the R&B prodigy. If you haven’t checked it out by now, grab a few friends and watch/listen/experience this together, as it is truly a masterpiece worth enjoying.
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