Frank Ocean’s Silent Aesthetic

This article contends that silence plays a central role in Frank Ocean’s musical aesthetic. Arguing that the increased use of silence across his body of work comes about in response to his becoming a celebrity musician in our media-soaked 21 st century, the piece uses his 2016 album Blonde as a case study to examine Ocean’s silences as key events in a “situated aesthetics” (Manzotti; see also Born, Lewis and Straw), heavily dependent on the musical material and the media contexts in which they occur. Drawing on P. David Marshall’s definition of the early 21 st century as the age of “public intimacy,” the article analyses Ocean’s music in the light of selected musical precursors and contemporaries (from John Cage to Beyoncé) in order to better understand his uses of silence: to protect his private life from the media, to control his public image in dealings with the music industry, and to draw his listeners in when creating music, both in the studio and during Ocean’s increasingly rare live performances.