“It’s been so long. Everybody talks about how long it’s been,’” Frank Ocean told an uneasy crowd at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Sunday evening. “But I have missed you.”
Ocean started his highly anticipated headlining set about an hour late. Before that, crew members buzzed around the front of the stage beneath a monolithic screen, seemingly still building the set. Earlier that day, the internet lit up at the realization that Ocean’s performance—his first live show since 2017, having been rescheduled after the pandemic derailed his plan to headline Coachella in 2020—wouldn’t be livestreamed as planned. When I arrived at the festival grounds around 4 p.m. that afternoon, an event employee working the bag check station delivered bad (if unconfirmed) news: I shouldn’t tell you this, but Frank’s not here. He pulled out.
At the witching hour, when a screen in front of the main stage plainly assured that “Frank Ocean will begin at 10:05,” a packed crowd was exhausted and on-edge. Concertgoers, some wearing bootleg or handmade Frank merch or dressed in head-to-toe Channel Orange-orange ensembles, wondered aloud if he’d even show up. Playing on repeat in my head was Ocean’s churning chorus on Jay-Z and Ye’s collab track “No Church in the Wild,” which would briefly play aloud here within the hour:
Human beings in a mob / What’s a mob to a king? / What’s a king to a God? / What’s a God to a non-believer / who don’t believe in anything?
When Ocean finally took to the stage on Sunday, he seemed anxious, too. He also seemed excited. His set opened with an amped-up version of “Novacane,” the single from his 2011 mixtape Nostalgia Ultra that kick started his career ascension—you know, the one on which he sings about meeting a girl at Coachella. (In the week before his performance, fans thought the project project might finally land on streaming platforms—a rumor spurned by BMW’s Instagram post of a model quite similar to the pearlescent orange BMW E30 M3 that appears on Nostalgia’s album artwork.) From there, he segued into an unreleased 2021 track called “Come On World, You Can’t Go!” whose lyrics framed his tension as an artist: “I can’t be great ’til I can escape.” If Frank had successfully escaped, here he was, pulled back, pulled back again.
He scurried about the stage, wearing a bright blue Mammut puffer with the hood pulled up snug over a black durag (a variation on a beloved outfit he wore in Paris a few years back), rejiggering logistics with managers and technicians in real time. “This is chaos,” he admitted to a crowd that had already caught on. Yet he performed as though he couldn’t wait to show us what he’s been into lately, mixing several of his most-loved tracks into new arrangements none of us had ever heard before.
Clad in his insulated space suit, from his frenetic alcove beneath the stage, Ocean mystified the audience at points, either playing stripped down versions of his hits, or playing the studio audio of old tracks while he lip-synced and danced around stage with a toothy grin, cheeky-mugging at the camera. At some point, he toted out the tennis-ball-green robot baby he brought to the 2021 Met Gala. Finally, at one point, he llet us in on where his head was at: He was performing here tonight not because he had new music to release any time soon, but because he to used to attend Coachella with his younger brother Ryan Breaux, who died in a car accident in 2020 at age 18.
“I feel like I was dragged out here half the time because I hated the dust out here. I always wound up with a respiratory infection or what have you. So I would, like, avoid coming. But I always ended up here,” he said, recalling the time he saw rap duo Rae Sremmurd with Ryan and their friend, Travis “Taco” Bennett. “I know he would have been so excited to be here with all of us,” said Ocean of his brother, addressing a crowd who appeared to have forgotten, or were even unaware, that the musician had been grieving such a loss.
This was the moment when the audience’s expectations should have shifted; this is a form of mourning, which probably, reasonably, informed all the weird choices including an alleged last-minute redesign, which was also reportedly impacted by an ankle injury Ocean sustained during rehearsals. Forgoing any particulars, Ocean promised to get back to the music, which felt like a heartbreak in itself.
All told, he seemed intent on not doing a just a Frank Ocean show even though that was, undoubtedly, exactly what the Coachella mob had anticipated, especially after the previous nights’ headliners delivered huge-scale performances: Friday’s rousing, expository two-hour set by Bad Bunny and Saturday’s fantastically glossy, tightly choreographed act from the K-pop megaband Blackpink. After the French DJ Crystallmess performed a (frankly awesome) 10-minute mash-up in the middle of the set—with the cracking inclusion of up-and-comer Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood—Ocean conceded that if “you came to see Frank Ocean,” you probably weren’t expecting a bounce-heavy rave interlude. He said he wanted the show to reflect his current artistic practice that he’s built in the years since he made Blonde, which has recently included hosting parties. Despite the DJ set’s direct invitation to dance, the Coachella crowd did not rave along. Instead, there were lots of blank stares and incredulous commentary. He should have played more of the hits and less of that instrumental shit, I overheard a popular TikTokker saying after the show ended.
Why fans of the elusive musician’s insular music would necessarily expect him to put on a rollicking show raises a lot of different concerns here, but the show he did put on—frenzied, messy, full of grief—had so many moments of ecstasy. It was good, and it was also special. Though Ocean clearly did not allot enough time for the paint to dry on whatever he had planned to do here, one thing was clear: Frank still loves these songs as much as we do. I only wish we’d gotten that extra hour to hear them.
At about 20 minutes past midnight, the show was cut short. After the late start, Ocean and company had hit the festival’s Sunday-night curfew. Members of the band stayed in their places for a few moments longer, not sure if they could believe it themselves. His incidental closing song was a version of the Isley Brothers track “At Your Best (You Are Love)” made famous again in the mid-’90s by Aaliyah, which Ocean once said was one of his favorite songs he’s ever covered.
“I was at a party and it came on, and I had to sing it. And I didn’t connect it to [the 2006 movie] ATL, with T.I. and Lauren London. I watched that movie a lot for some reason when I was 18 and first moved to LA,” he told GQ in 2019. “I think because it reminded me of home, and that song played when T.I. had the El Camino and first kissed New New, but I didn’t connect it when I was at that party years later that it was something from nostalgia. I started living with it, thinking about how I could do it justice.”
There was a break in the din before he sang “At Your Best,” when I heard a few voices from the pit shouting at Ocean to play “Super Rich Kids,” a track on Channel Orange about materialistic young people partying among palm trees and pools. His face filling the Jumbotron, I could have sworn Frank cracked a smile.
And here Frank was again, now at age 35, starting another chapter of sorts in Southern California. Even so, he’s still living with nostalgia, and thinking about how he could do it justice.