Last year was my first time writing an overrated, for 2011 of course, and I couldn't’t have asked for a better album to lambaste: Adele’s 21 is just the absolute worst, it was like dating a woman who is always PMSing and really, does any man like the album, I mean… well, I mean this isn’t about the most rated album of 2011, it is about the most overrated album of 2012 and oddly enough it is like dating a man having his own private breakdown. The difference between the two is that Frank Ocean’s debut album isn’t bad. I’ve been writing about Frank for years now and I’ve almost thought him a talented fellow. Frank’s work on 2011’s Goblin was exemplary, “She” remains a magnificent achievement. As a team pleasure or with the lowered expectation of a mixtape, I admire the young man, I truly do. And even live, I’ve seen him three times, though only once as a headliner, he is a little on the bland side but I quite like his show.
And I have friends who swear by “Think’ Bout You” and I don’t blame em, it is a great song. And while nothing else on the album matches it, “Sweet Life” “Super Rich Kids” and “Forrest Gump” are all pretty good. I didn't’t say they weren't’t. I said they are wildly overrated. Half of this album is toxic, “Pyramids” is terrible. I don’t know what people are hearing but it isn’t beat, it isn’t lyric, and all the bending of the melody line? It is, in a word pretentious in ways soulmen from Stevie Wonder to Marvin Gaye, who recorded the fairly out there Here My Dear, never were.
Frank Ocean got lucky: the right sound, the right publicity, the right album. And more power to him. But that doesn't make Channel Orange much more than a pretty good album.