#2 Five Years Later

   "I like the color green, in every shade." uttered Frank Ocean in his monologue at the end of "LEMONHEAD" (2021) by Tyler, the Creator. To an outside listener, this was just the outro to a song on the latest Tyler album; however, anyone with awareness of Ocean's ghost status to social media and news outlets, knows that this is the first time in almost two years that his voice had made an appearance to streaming services. To a Frank Ocean stan, this was the part where we all started jumping up and down in excitement.

    August 20th marked the five year anniversary of Ocean's critically acclaimed album Blonde. Since 2016, fans have been left with very few releases of singles and features from the artist. He rarely posts on social media and makes rare public appearances, leaving us fans begging for even an Instagram post. 

    January 2020, it was announced that Frank Ocean would be headlining Coachella along with Rage Against the Machine, and Travis Scott. At the time, this was some of the most exciting but confusing news for fans. He hadn't released much, posted, or really ever performed live up until this announcement. This left us with the question, "What's the catch?" Well we shortly got an answer a couple months later when Covid-19 came to the USA and shut everything down, including his Coachella set.

    The months following the cancelled festival left everyone in a Frank Ocean drought. It had gotten to a point where a lot of fans mutually agreed that Frank Ocean retired. This was the result of his younger brother, Ryan, getting into a car accident and passing away. He had Ryan featured on his outro song of Blonde, “Futura Free”, where he ended the album by going around doing interviews. He was super close with Ryan so of course it had impacted the fan community as a whole. This led to a majority agreement that if he couldn’t go on to keep making music because of this big loss, it was respected and not argued with. He had completely gone ghost from everything, so it was only enforcing the rumor that he was retiring. Then Call Me If You Get Lost by Tyler, the Creator had dropped. 

    The “LEMONHEAD” surprise feature not only made people gasp, it reassured us that Frank wasn’t done with music. Him talking about the color green was a reference to his album Blonde, with the famous cover showing him with green hair. In his most recent public appearance at the Met Gala, Frank walked the carpet with his hair in the shade of green he is known for, possibly implying that his return isn’t far away. Green is a color that fans will forever associate with him, and he dangles this right in our face. It has been a long five years for his fans, all we can do from here is continue streaming Blonde and hope the pain of no new music eases soon.