Frank Ocean

Frank Ocean Talks With GQ Magazine

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Frank Ocean sat down with GQ Magazine:

With some pop stars, the idea of them is maybe more balanced or fully formed: a half-dozen magazine covers, x amount of interviews, a daily influx of media. There’s a way you wanna be in the visual press, although you could potentially be misrepresented; when you’re completely minimal with media, there’s a lot of pressure on whatever one thing you’re doing, the stakes are higher. Social media helps that, ’cause you’re fully in control and can message that how you want.

Frank Ocean Interviews Timothée Chalamet

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Frank Ocean recently interviewed Timothée Chalamet for V Man:

Absolutely. I’m a total “nostalgist” and Call Me By Your Name’s director, Luca, grew up in that time period. In fact, the book is set in ’88 and he changed it to ’83 because he said that was the year in your life you can hear music from. In the movie, there’s Talking Heads, The Psychedelic Furs, or just the Bach or Beethoven—those are all songs from Luca’s youth, what it was like for him in Italy in the ’80s.

Frank Ocean Beats Estranged Dad’s Libel Suit

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Melissa Daniels, writing for Law360:

Grammy Award-winning musician Frank Ocean beat a $14.5 million libel suit from his estranged father Tuesday, when a California federal judge ruled at a daylong bench trial that the dad hadn’t shown that his son defamed him with a 2016 Tumblr post that recounted him calling a transgender waitress an anti-gay slur.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson said that while the court doesn’t have to rule whether the statement was truthful, Calvin Cooksey still had failed to meet necessary elements to make his defamation claim.

Kanye West Says He’ll Boycott Grammys if Frank Ocean Isn’t Nominated

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Kanye West has claimed he’ll boycott the Grammys if Frank Ocean isn’t nominated:

Kanye talked about his love for Ocean’s music, saying, “The album I listen to the most this year is Frank Ocean’s album.” He went on, “I’ll tell you this right now: If his album’s not nominated in no categories, I’m not showin’ up to the Grammys.”

Frank Ocean’s albums were not submitted for consideration.

Frank Ocean Ineligible for Grammys

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Billboard is reporting that Frank Ocean’s Blonde will be ineligible for the Grammys this year.

A source confirms to Billboard that neither album was submitted for consideration by Ocean’s labels, management or other reps, even though both were released well before the 2017 Grammy eligibility cutoff date of Sept. 30, 2016.

Report: Label Let Frank Ocean Out of Contract Early

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Mesfin Fekadu, writing for the Associated Press, details how a source claims Frank Ocean was let out of his record contract early:

Even before Frank Ocean released his albums “Endless” and “Blonde” on Apple Music last month, he and his label decided the relationship was over.

A person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press that Ocean’s label, Def Jam, decided to let the singer out of his contract early because the relationship between the singer and the label was like a “bad marriage.” The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not allowed to publicly speak about the topic, did not say how many albums Ocean was contracted for, but added that “it wasn’t going to work out.”

Frank Ocean Tops Billboard Charts

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Frank Ocean’s Blonde tops the Billboard charts this week.

Frank Ocean earns his first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with the arrival of Blonde. The set, which was released on Aug. 20, bows atop the list with 276,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Aug. 25, according to Nielsen Music.

Blonde logs the third-largest debut of 2016, behind only the arrivals of Drake’s Views and Beyonce’s Lemonade.

Frank Ocean’s Album Is the Straw That Broke Universal Music’s Back

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Dan Rys, writing at Billboard, about how Frank Ocean’s latest release is causing all kinds of headaches over at Universal:

After an interminable wait (in music industry standards, at least), Ocean fulfilled his contractual obligations, sources tell Billboard, and increased his potential profit share from 14 percent to 70 percent of total revenues from Blond within a 24-hour period, seemingly pulling a fast one on the biggest music company in the world in the process. Def Jam and its parent Universal, stuck with an overshadowed visual album that isn’t for sale, and cut out of any revenue from the “proper” album that’s headed to the top of the charts on the strength of 225,000 to 250,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Aug. 25, were left with what amounts to a very long music video and without one of their marquee artists.