FRANK OCEAN ALBUMS LIST FULL

I'm not suggesting a Sweet Life shooter or Monks As A Service. Very few of them would make good video games, but Channel Orange is the exception. There are a lot of albums that I could listen to from start to finish.

FRANK OCEAN ALBUMS LIST FULL

And it's full of such rich, engaging stories that inverting it, turning the whole thing into a video game, is the best tribute I can think of for one of my favourite albums of all time. It feels like a love letter to video games - not to Street Fighter 2, nor to any specific game - but to the pure escapism video games can offer. Channel Orange, bookended by the PS1 start up and the fuzz of a CRT TV switching off, wraps up Ocean's songs in the era and the memories of the PS1.

The sounds, the look, and the feel of the machine reminds us of the time we were enthralled by the PS1. We might associate the PS1 with Final Fantasy 7, Tekken 3, and Crash Bandicoot, but the truth is we all associate the console with something deeper.

This beep follows the distinctive start up sound of the original PlayStation, before Ocean takes us on a journey of unrequited love, drug addiction, coming out, religion, Hurricane Katrina, and existential dread.

It's this sound which opens his debut album Channel Orange, a narrative album about a conflicted adolescence whose only constant was video games. For Frank Ocean, evidently, it's the Street Fighter 2 opening beep. For me, it's the Artisans theme in Spyro The Dragon. We all have a sound which reminds us of our gaming childhood. A classic album tangled with a classic piece of hardware.

Frank ocean albums list