The year is 2025, and musician Christopher Edwin “Frank Ocean” Breaux has gone silent again. The most elusive and lucrative artist on the planet has gone without a trace, except for the release of four singles, two in 2019 and two in 2020. Various posts on his Instagram have been made and recently the creation of two fake Instagram accounts were noticed: kiki boyyyyyyy and OZPINHEAD.
The public has been inconsistently fed on his music and online presence for nine years. Despite his disappearance from the public eye, the singer-songwriter and contemporary pioneer of R&B remains one of the top artists of today.
“I’d say I started listening to him [during my] freshman year— I fell in love with his music because his song topics are all so relatable, and he makes ordinary things sound so beautiful. Whenever I go through something, I can always turn on his music, and I feel like he understands,” says Siena Igarta, a junior at Ida B. Wells High School, and an avid listener of Ocean.
How he remains popular in the music scene is a phenomenon to all. “I think his disappearance can be frustrating because a lot of fans, including myself, have been waiting for new music. I don’t think it’s out of his character to go away from the public eye, but it’s surprising,” says Amarillis McMillan, a junior at Ida B. Wells, and another frequent listener of Ocean. “It’s been so long,”
Ocean began his music career with Odd Future, a collective of California artists, known for introducing Tyler “The Creator” Okonma and Ocean to the music industry, which has been a key factor in the creation of new artists pushing the musical envelope.
While in the collective, Ocean appeared on various tracks doing harmonies, hooks and small verses on the “Odd Future Tape.” While this did expose him to the public eye, it never fully showcased his talent.
This changed in 2011 with the release of Ocean’s debut mixtape, “Nostalgia Ultra,” a project where he covered famous pop instrumentals from the early 2000s, such as “Strawberry Swing” by Coldplay and “Electric Feels” by MGMT.
But Ocean wasn’t done; just a year later, he released another project that captured the attention of big-name artists around the world. On July 10, 2012, “channel ORANGE” elevated the genre of R&B forever.
Infused with funk, soul and rap, Ocean gave an in-depth explanation of the importance of love and the ways we express it as humans. On songs like “Thinkin’ Bout You,” Ocean portrays love in two ways: instrumentally, where he uses an ascending collection of violin harmonics in the intro, consistently high registered synth chords and a dream-like falsetto, while lyrically saying, “You know you were my first time, a new feel” and “We’ll go down this road till it’s black and white.”
Four years later, Ocean released his magnum opus “Blond(e).” Before its release, Ocean would have a three-year-long hiatus from music. The album went in-depth about his disappearance and the problems he experienced with masculinity, as well as accepting his sexuality as a homosexual male.
The result? A stunning contemporary R&B album that garnered massive praise from fans and critics everywhere. Highlighted for its use of introspective lyrics and progressive sounds, “Blond(e)” truly captured the hearts of teenagers and adults alike. But, even after all this success, Ocean would take yet another break from the public. A break that would be the product of the emotional turmoil felt when he lost his brother, Ryan Breaux, at 18 years old due to a car accident.
However, even with a nearly decade-long hiatus from the public eye, Ocean still seems to be relevant in the mainstream for listeners of all ages. With well over 30 million monthly listeners and his songs added to hundreds of thousands of listeners’ playlists each year, fans will always be quick to assume a new project is around the corner with every new post connected to Ocean.
With Ocean’s high success, it begs the question: How is Ocean still relevant without the release of new music or a single social media post, and how long will it be before the mass speculation becomes ridiculous and pestering, leading Ocean to postpone a future project further?
Ocean’s popularity has only grown since his hiatus. In 2020, his playlist reach was only 13,770. Today, Ocean’s playlist reach is at 52,595. This comes as a surprise because his two most recent releases, singles “Cayendo” and “Dear April,” came out in 2019.
Ocean has a total of 20.64 billion streams overall. Despite limited new releases, Ocean’s Spotify activity shows his monthly listeners have more than doubled from 16 million to over 34 million. His total streams have climbed from around 10 billion in 2022 to over 14 billion by late 2023 as well.
Norman Stremming, an AP Psychology and Anthropology at IBW, hypothesizes that the intense speculation of Ocean’s career could be the result of “self-induced hysteria” or “egocentrism.” “Because there’s so much mystery around this artist, and because we’re living in an age of instant gratification, our curiosity spikes when we can’t get a piece of information, or in this case, musical content, right away,” says Stremming. “Furthermore, social media groups fall into the pit-fall of being heavily polarized by their peers, biased to [random] confirmation, and overall competitiveness to be the so-called first one to crack the code.”
Beyond this, the social interactions between artists and fans have grown more chaotic by the year, from stalking and breaking things of personal value to get the attention of various artists. “As social creatures, our biological response to finding an answer to something is innate, meaning that the invasion of others is bound to happen in one way or another. Perhaps Ocean knows this and chooses to stay out of the spotlight for these reasons…” says Stremming.
The invasion of privacy for celebrities is one of the many issues they struggle with, especially musical artists. Every day, mainstream artists are consistently getting their new music leaked or hacked and sold across the internet.
Without a single interaction with the public in nine years, Ocean is a man of mystery who rules the music industry with an iron fist and is the catalyst for breaking contemporary culture. In a world of instant gratification, Ocean’s music challenges listeners to appreciate all the steps to a project’s release, from the constant speculation to the time it’s spread throughout all platforms.
Ocean is simply creating quality work and paving the way for future artists to do the same. But how long will it be before the mysterious act fizzles out and Ocean’s name truly fades into obscurity, becoming a relic of the past?
