Swimming Good

12 years on from its release, and Nostalgia, ULTRA still occupies a special place in my heart. I found it a bit late after hearing the Novocane single either on the radio or at a party at some point while I was living in Raleigh, NC, and when I did I remember it burrowing into my psyche in an indelible way. At the time, the only R&B I was really aware of was radio stuff from the likes of Usher (shout out), Trey Songz, Beyonce (shout out), Ashanti (shout out), etc which mapped itself largely against X and Y axes of sexual and personal ambition maximalism to great effect. Going back later I’d realize there was quite a bit more nuance to the genre at the time than I could find on an FM station, but the victory anthem milieu wasn’t a bad one by any means and I was happy to digest it alongside the other shit I was into then.

Nostalgia, ULTRA felt like something different, though. I’d been into Girl Talk for a few years by then and was already far down a rabbit hole on the ways in which DJs and mashup producers were sawmilling cultural totems into temporary party barns in real time with no assembly required. I was also getting fascinated by how the Internet was already moving so quickly that the amount of time between an object creating an impact crater in the current cultural landscape and being buried thoroughly enough to become a sacred, nostalgic artifact was shrinking almost by the hour. So when I heard it for the first time, it felt like the same sort of archeological dig but with a different destination. If Girl Talk was an uncovering of an old city’s trash heap teaching us more about the day to day lives of the citizens, Nostalgia, ULTRA felt like accidentally digging through the roof of the space where they used to worship.

Take the second track “Strawberry Swing” for example. Frank Ocean pulls a Coldplay instrumental from their Viva La Vida album and traps its sonic emotion in a mason jar like a lightning bug. The surroundings its pulsing light illuminates, however, once Frank carries it back to his studio are decidedly different from Coldplay’s original track. Frank crones over it about atomic bombs and the apocalypse, and the contrast serves to convey Frank’s personal loss of spatial familiarity and connection to New Orleans which he had just traded for a life in LA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It also works as an anthem of a more universal ache after either a fictional global demolition, or the always-possible nuclear conflict that hovers over modern society like the sword of Damocles. No matter how far you zoom in or out, the ache is equally devastating.

And this structure here is why I think this album is so incredible. One of Frank Ocean’s titanic strengths is his discovery of a Fibonacci sequence-level structural harmony between humanity’s individual and collective suffering and grief, a resonance which has only tightened in the Internet Age. And his mixture of here of his own production work with reinterpretations of Coldplay, Mr Hudson, MGMT, and The Eagles hints at our entrance into a world where anything that isn’t Now becomes almost instantly ancient and reusable. The same can be said for this mixtape itself after even casual reflection on Ocean’s impact on the musical landscape in the years following, and for its cover art which features Ocean’s dream car at the time: The iconic mid to late 80s darling BMW E30 M3 re-surfaced and reworked into something new, and parked the same way you might see something abandoned in a deep Southern front yard.

Much more could be said about this album, but I’ll leave you with this. If the etymology of the word nostalgia means something close to the memory of an old wound (appropriately conflated with homesickness), then Ocean does something brilliant here with focusing on what the world old might mean now. The wounds found in the songs here are still very much open and un-pressurized, but they seem to already exist in his psyche as an magnetic artifact leftover from a previous life. Perhaps this portrays the ways in which we try to move on in an ever-connected age, and perhaps it indicates the Hotel California-ish ways in which we never really can.

You can give it a listen here: