Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Frank Ocean · S1 E2
Crescent City
Growing up in New Orleans, surrounded by jazz, bounce, and gospel on every corner
New Orleans, 1993. A five-year-old boy steps out of a car on the Westbank and hears a brass band playing three blocks away. Nobody on the sidewalk even looks up.
"Bad Religion" (Frank Ocean, live on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 2012). That organ you hear? It sounds like every Sunday morning in every New Orleans church Frank walked past as a kid. The gospel harmonics of the Crescent City are all over this song.
Bad Religion, Frank Ocean (2012)
Built around a church organ that sounds like it was pulled straight from a Sunday service in the Tremé, Frank co-produced this track with Malay and Om'Mas Keith. The song tells the story of a man confessing his deepest secret to a taxi driver because he has nowhere else to turn. Listen for how the organ swells and recedes like a congregation breathing together. Frank grew up hearing these sounds through open windows every weekend in New Orleans, and when he needed to write the most honest song on channel ORANGE, he reached for the instrument that defined his childhood.
Sources
Dombal, Ryan. "Frank Ocean: channel ORANGE." Pitchfork, July 2012.
Wallace, Amy. "Frank Ocean: The All-American Boy." GQ, December 2012.
The City That Teaches You Music
New Orleans doesn't teach you music. It drowns you in it. Second-line parades roll through neighborhoods on any given Sunday, brass bands play on street corners for tips and for practice, and bounce music rattles from car stereos at every red light. For a kid with an ear, growing up here is the equivalent of being enrolled in a conservatory you never asked to attend.
Sources
Sublette, Ned. "The World That Made New Orleans." Lawrence Hill Books, 2008.
“He grew up in New Orleans, a city where you can hear a tuba on one block and a bounce beat rattling a trunk on the next. That's the kind of childhood that trains your ear without you even knowing it.”
— Jon Caramanica, "Frank Ocean's Lonely, Lovely Debut," The New York Times, July 2012
New Orleans Westbank
Across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter and the Tremé, this is where Christopher Breaux grew up. A working-class stretch of neighborhoods where brass bands, gospel choirs, and bounce music provided a constant, inescapable soundtrack.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did teenage Frank Ocean pay for his first real studio sessions?
Godspeed, Frank Ocean (2016)
The final proper track on Blonde, Godspeed is Frank's most direct connection to gospel music. Built on a swell of organ and choir voices, it sounds like it was recorded in one of the New Orleans churches Frank passed every Sunday as a boy. In an episode about the city that raised him, this song works like a blessing from the place that gave him his ear.
Godspeed, Frank Ocean (2016)
"I will always love you, how I do." Read the lyrics while you listen. Godspeed is a farewell song dressed up as a hymn. The gospel production connects straight back to the churches and funerals of New Orleans, where every goodbye comes with a brass band and a benediction.
New Orleans: The File
What is the New Orleans tradition where a brass band leads a procession through the streets, followed by dancing crowds?
There's a piano in the house, and nobody else is playing it. Next: a teenager discovers that the instrument gathering dust in the corner is about to become his entire world.
0 XP earned this session