article by freelancer kc duru
Frank Ocean took the Coachella stage the night of April 16th and sadly, it wasn’t the performance I was expecting for his big return to a live audience. Ocean started the show about an hour after he was slated to perform. Stunning visuals displayed on a giant screen signaled the start of his performance. Dancers circled Ocean and his band, then after multiple minutes Ocean launched into his set with the hit song “Novacane.”
Ocean performed to a sprawling crowd of tens of thousands of people in Indio, California, where the Coachella festival is held annually. He was initially scheduled to headline the music festival in 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic canceled the event altogether. Ocean is no rookie to the festival since he performed at the festival in 2012, though this was his first time performing as a headliner at the popular festival. This is also historic for Coachella, with Frank Ocean being the festival’s first openly queer headliner.
This performance was highly anticipated by Frank Ocean fans who have been holding out hope for a new album from the singer sometime in the (hopefully very near) future. Ocean confirmed the existence of a new album that night, but squashed rumors of it coming out anytime soon, telling the crowd “not that there’s not a new album…but there’s not right now.” Ocean eventually took the Coachella stage, but his performance wasn’t without controversies.
Coachella live streamed virtually all performances on YouTube all weekend long and heavily advertised the streaming of Ocean’s set up to mere hours before he was scheduled to headline Sunday night. However, about 3 hours before Ocean’s scheduled performance YouTube tweeted that “Frank Ocean is not scheduled to appear on the Coachella live stream.” This left fans who were unable to attend Coachella in person, myself included, shocked, confused and scrambling to find a way to tune in.
Festival goers came to the rescue for many, live streaming the performance to thousands on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok from their phones in the middle of the California desert. @tomsymusic on Instagram was my personal hero streaming the concert in its entirety with almost 10,000 viewers watching the live, at its peak. Another account, @morgandoesntcare on Instagram, garnered over 100,000 viewers while streaming the event from the very front of the crowd.
Before his Coachella performance Ocean was on a hiatus for almost 6 years. His last live performance took place at the Fuck Yeah Festival summer of 2017. This performance also marks Ocean’s first performance since his younger brother, Ryan Breaux’s, tragic death in a car accident in 2020 at the age of 18. Ocean opened up about his brother in his first remarks to the crowd, admitting that in the “past couple years, my life changed so much.” He recalled fond memories of attending Coachella with his brother in the past, watching artists like Rae Sremmurd and Travis “Taco” Bennett while “dancing in that tent to their music.”
Despite the late axing of the live stream, and the fact that Ocean was more than fashionably late, the performance itself unfortunately fell flat.
Don’t get me wrong, moments during the concert when Ocean sang hits like “Bad Religion,” “White Ferrari,” and a cover of a song made famous by singer Aaliyah, “At Your Best (You Are Love)”, were magnificent, soulful, and emotional. It was the moments when he wasn’t singing that bothered fans who were there to see him.
There were about 10 minutes of the set where DJ Crystall Mess abruptly began playing dancey remixes of Ocean’s discography (with other artists like Ice Spice added to the mix as well), that Ocean wasn’t even singing along to. Ocean also brought a singer he referred to as his “inner child,” Josiah, on stage to lip-synch to Ocean covering “Night Life” by Willie Nelson, and later lip-synched the entirety of fan-favorite song “Nights” while dancing around the stage.
To top it all off, the show ended about 30 minutes shy of the 2-hour time period allotted. Ocean gave a final goodbye by simply stating “I’m being told it’s curfew so that’s the end of the show, thank you so much.”
The concert definitely left fans puzzled, to say the least. To add another blow to fans, Ocean pulled out of performing at Coachella’s weekend 2 Wednesday, April 19th, just four days before he was set to take the stage to close out the festival for the year. His team cites “two fractures and a sprain in his left leg.” According to Variety, the band Blink-182 stepped up as headliner in his place. It’s hard to be critical of Ocean’s return to the stage because of the immense loss that he faced so recently in the death of his younger brother. Hopefully he takes the time to heal, both emotionally and physically. Who knows when he’ll return to the stage next?