Which might feel somewhat incongruous in what are unequivocally urgent times but there’s a hell of a case for slowing down - as consumers, dreamers, creators. Endless might actually be a statement on the art of patience. It would be easy to view the whole thing as a metaphor for the creative process (the “endless” formation, evolution, destruction and/or revision of ideas) – if the warehouse is Frankie’s brain.
The staircase is effectively destroyed as he ascends to its summit (around the 38-minute mark), before Frank resumes silently building from scratch all over again. On the 45-minute long visual album Endless, we watch numerous Frank Oceans stalk the interior of a large industrial warehouse as they proceed to construct – in between breaks to check a smartphone – a tall wooden spiral staircase. I’m not sure Frank Ocean set out to foreground these issues, but as impatience began to mount over the consistent delay of the album’s release, they became impossible for him to ignore.
He’s acutely aware of this dynamic, and the changing relationships between the consumer, product, art and artist, is a theme suspended in constant and quiet orbit around this project – which is really two projects (neither of which are called Boys Don’t Cry): Endless, the visual album and prelude, and Blonde (or Blond), the album-album. We constructed the mystery for ourselves all he had to do was vanish. Most of this proved to be either insubstantial, or flatly incorrect. The internet was awash with memes, GIFs, questions, conspiracies, and timelines fastidiously updating and voraciously over-analysing every fresh lead on where exactly Frank Ocean was, and what he was up to.
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