Frank Ocean’s Coachella set was beautiful and misunderstood

For all his virtue, there are many reasons why fans find Frank Ocean so frustrating. He rarely performs. He’s released two studio albums in 11 years and only a handful of videos – the best of which, “Nikes”, isn’t even on YouTube. He does press sparingly, obfuscating details about his inner life when he does. He cancels appearances, rescinds announcements, deletes Instagram posts (never in a ‘new era loading’ marketing campaign way). He barely endorses brands, either. To cure the stress of overworking, Frank once told Aziz Ansari, “You just gotta be comfortable making less money, that’s all”, advice antithetical to the present moment of celebrity musician. 

Mythos and disappointment can be two sides of the same coin. On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of Coachella attendees — and many further tuned in on patchy Instagram lives (shout out @morgandoesntcare) in lieu of an official live-stream that never was on the schedule — put aside what they knew to be true of the artist in favour of what they felt they most wanted and deserved: an album announcement and date, the new music, the biggest hits, and a performance as thoughtfully executed as that of Coachella’s last blockbuster headliner, Beyoncé. And that is largely what they received, but Frank’s version was never going to be straightforward.

In the two and a half hours that followed Björk’s set finishing and Frank’s beginning, a vast new screen was assembled across the main stage, save for a small rectangular section at the centre bottom, in which he and his band could be viewed by the first few rows. With such anticipation often comes unrealistic expectations (with every moving piece and changing graphic, anticipation only intensified, some believing this to be part of the performance itself as, after all, this was an artist who released Endless, a visual album simply of himself building a staircase). Commencing the show, choreographed dancers wearing custom Prada circled an inner set, a space not dissimilar to his previous festival tour, designed like an intimate studio completely antithetical to the vast scale of the stage and audience around it. After a period of silence, “Novacane”, the track many first discovered Frank via in 2011 (and one which name-drops Coachella), came first, breaking somewhere in the middle into a joyous, exhilaratingly high-tempo pop rock version. 

As you’ve already watched on TikTok, Frank refashioned most of his old tracks into new sounds (“Wise Man”, recorded but cut from the Django Unchained soundtrack, was made near unrecognisable and totally un-singalongable, a trick straight out of the Bob Dylan playbook), interspersing these with unreleased numbers and covers, closing on “At Your Best (You Are Love)” by The Isley Brothers, first covered by Aaliyah, then by Frank on Endless. Somewhere in the middle, DJ CRYSTALLMESS melded together an interlude using Virgil Abloh’s decks, mixing tracks like “Slide” and “No Church in the Wild” with samples like “Born Slippy” to replicate the energy of his short-lived series of club nights, PrEP+, which, like his 2020 appearance, fell victim to the pandemic. It was also a nod to how important artists like CRYSTALLMESS were to his practice, he later explained, deserved of their own spot on music’s biggest stage. A security guard shook his ass to this set for a good few minutes up on the big screen. 

It’s understandable why some fans may feel frustrated, particularly those who travelled across the world and spent hours standing in the Coachella Valley heat to secure a space in the front row (@morgandoesntcare, who drew upwards of 130,000 views on her Instagram live, however, has no regrets). The show did feel short in comparison to the size of its anticipation — but that anticipation was much too big in the first place. Here is where earlier comparisons with Endless also feel relevant. Endless was an album that drew confusion and disappointment when it arrived, only to quickly grow in respect once listeners had overplayed Blonde and returned to it in later. He said it himself, a new album is coming. Perhaps this means more live performances, too. The show had some spectacular moments of creativity and vocal talent — “Bad Religion” was phenomenal — moments which will likely be more appreciated once people have sat with the performance a little longer, or enjoyed other new work to come. But even if not, don’t weigh everything on just one show. 

Since Frank’s first slated appearance came and went in 2020, the music industry has changed, and with it, so did the two remaining headline slots. Travis Scott and Rage Against the Machine never ended up rescheduling their performances. This year, his fellow headliners – Bad Bunny and BLACKPINK – became the festival’s first-ever Spanish and Korean language headliners, respectively. Both represent a new era of pop music in the US that took flight with the streaming boom, an era that relies on tours and high-energy productions to make the kind of money that Spotify can’t. Frank has always operated outside of these trends and always will; his Coachella performance was no exception.