And yet at the same time he's building this distance, he's also inviting the listener into his most intimate feelings. It begins with Ocean's voice pitched way up, disguised by filters, immediately creating a distance between the listener and the singer. The Dualities of (Blonde)įor example, "Nikes " explores the binary between distance and intimacy. If there ever was a non-dual album, it's Blonde, which constantly grapples with contradictions, spinning them into a whole. Understanding the reality of that consciousness as well as the reality of our individual, binary-torn world is understanding non-duality. There are many different definitions of non-duality, one of which is the idea that there is an infinite consciousness where all dualities do not exist. Non-duality is a difficult concept to explain, and some Buddhist texts theorize that if you understand non-duality you'll have reached enlightenment. Namely, it appears in Buddhism, particularly in terms of the concept of non-duality. The concept of particle-wave duality is a relatively new scientific revelation, but the idea that contradictory ideas can exist at the same time is frequently found in ancient philosophies. But Blonde interrogates these boundaries, lamenting the divisions they create, eventually reaching something like a state of wholeness in its willingness to accept contradictions.
Here, love and pain can be the same thing someone can be both there and not there.įrank Ocean - Blond - Full Album We live in a world that constantly divides things into binaries - good and evil, light and dark, man and woman, life and death. "He don't care for me, but he cares for me," Ocean sings in Nikes, the album's opener. On Blonde, two things can definitely exist at once. This is known as the "particle-wave duality," and it shatters the idea that entities must be one thing or the other. In that it's reminiscent of a quantum particle.One of the central ideas of quantum physics is that light can behave as both a particle and a wave in essence, something can be both one thing and another.
The "e," flickering in and out, is both there and not there. This extends to its title, which is spelled Blond on the album cover but Blonde on all streaming platforms. The most common reading of Blonde is that it is an album about dualities. Even so, despite all the analysis, each listen continues to reveal new truths. In 2019, Pitchfork ranked it the best album of the 2010s.
An entire episode of the podcast Dissolve was dedicated to picking apart its skeletal, psychedelic songs. Blonde has been written about extensively.