Frank Ocean Shows Us a More Human Way to Perform

Frank Ocean was constructing an ice-skating rink in the Sonoran desert. This was his reported plan — to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on the night of April 16 inside, or in front of, or atop a frozen pool, defying the basic logic of weather. What better metaphor could there be for an artist seemingly allergic to the typical mechanisms of the music industry than to accept the headlining slot at Coachella and then subvert it, to stage the opposite of the festival’s arid environment by scheming an icy exhibition among the sickening dust and heat? The rumored set design was ultimately scrapped, but the very concept of Ocean’s doomed ice rink felt symbolic — maybe of how distant this king of pop-world disenchantment felt from Coachella’s surroundings to begin with.

I was not in the desert. Nor did I really believe that I would be able to watch Ocean’s set — his first major public performance since 2017 — on an officially sanctioned livestream. Before he came onstage, YouTube clarified that Ocean’s 10:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time set would not be broadcast on Coachella’s own stream — his representatives say he was, in fact, never scheduled to appear on the stream — though this was not surprising. Enigma has always been a tenet of Ocean’s public persona. Having previously spurned the Grammy Awards, dismissed major record labels and called attention to the very nature of livestreaming with his 2016 visual album, “Endless,” Ocean was primed to opt out without apology.

It did not stop fans; links to spontaneous Instagram Live streams, by those on the ground, abounded. As it approached 1:05 a.m. in New York, I opened one of these links on my desktop and sat for an hour, waiting. Tens of thousands of us clicked on and waited. It was democratizing — there are no V.I.P. sections that I know of on Instagram Live — and the rumor was that Lorde was waiting in the same stream, too. We were all in it, waiting in the Frank Ocean IG Live, together.

When the music finally started, this particular improvised stream proved to be shaky — while the set quickly revealed itself to be an unconventional, at-times rough-hewed spectacle — cutting in and out as Ocean sang a rock version of “Novacane,” his 2011 breakthrough single about emotionless sex and a couple who meet at Coachella. Fortunately, I soon found @Morgandoesntcare, a young musician from North Carolina who facilitated the guerrilla video stream that brought Ocean’s set to the masses, reaching 130,000 viewers.

Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo.

Maybe Ocean said no to the sanctioned livestream because he knew his set wouldn’t be what he “intended to show,” as he acknowledged in a statement later that week. (According to that statement, he sustained a leg injury in the days before Coachella, requiring a rework of the show.) Maybe the choice was intuitive.

It’s enticing, however, to wonder if he made the decision in order to reject our on-demand culture of convenience. Some industry prognosticators have wondered if livestreams could supplant in-person concerts in the future — though it doesn’t seem likely — as ticket prices surge at the hands of exploitative corporations and make large-scale concertgoing increasingly unattainable to anyone but the rich. Livestreamed concerts by mainstream artists are often more like note-by-note recitals. With streaming more broadly, the data-driven music companies want to find patterns, to engineer us further into a culture of predictability. Intentionally or not, Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Watching a teenager’s ad hoc broadcast instead made for a more unruly digital experience that could not be predicted, planned for, optimized or controlled.

The day after Ocean’s set, it still consumed my thoughts. Though I had watched it on a trembly hand-held broadcast that cut in and out, I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant — not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream. Most reviews disagreed, criticizing how Ocean stoked “confusion” and commenting that his songs didn’t sound the way they do on his records. When I watched alone in my bedroom more than 2,000 miles away, these qualities made the music feel alive.

Liveness has always carried with it an expectation of, and invitation into, risk and imperfection. But the media landscape’s flood of manicured concert-film and livestream events has largely normalized staid, smooth performances, a trend that mirrors the streaming era’s broader preference for formulaic culture.

Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests.

Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke of this trend. New arrangements of his most beloved songs, like “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari,” sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Solo” approached something resembling starry electric jazz and nearly brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger brother, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella multiple times, immediately did. The songs sometimes showed their seams, letting his voice reach higher and skate the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” brought to mind the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”

Pop music history is filled with incidents in which celebrated artists polarized their audiences from big stages, but one important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and the unvarnished album that followed the next year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she sang her biblical hip-hop folk profundities in a gorgeous raspy voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. In between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered bewildering and met with divided reviews. Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”

You can imagine the now-35-year-old Ocean growing up, absorbing Hill’s messaging and reflecting his own unpolished reality in concert. When he played Coachella in 2012, he covered “Tell Him” from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Ocean has a documented fondness for her “Unplugged” performance: His song “Rushes,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; he once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a track on which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to, you know, to expose that to the public,” Hill said during the “MTV Unplugged” performance. She defended her right to let her voice crack, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture, and the rigid aesthetic standards it widely supports, are hostile to frayed edges.

On the spontaneous Ocean Instagram stream, I caught glory in flickers. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing the “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a just popular culture, that is what a “live” album, “live” stream, “live” concert and “live” artist is: raw, fallible and human.

Source photographs: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images; Timothy Hearsum/The Image Bank/Getty Images.

Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer, contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of “The Raincoats.”