Frank Ocean’s First Show in Six Years Sparks Backlash, Gives Us More Questions than Answers — 20 Watts Magazine

Frank Ocean’s Coachella set came an hour after schedule, featured a 10-minute dance interlude, saw Frank lip-sync some of his biggest hits, and left us wondering about a forgotten ice rink

By: Harry Sutton

On April 16, Frank Ocean performed for the first time in six years, resulting in one of 2023’s most surreal pop culture events. As Ocean hardly displayed any effort and awkwardly morphed some of his biggest hits into dance tracks, it wasn’t one of his best performances, but it was nonetheless remarkable.

Merely hours before Ocean’s return to live audiences, it was announced that Ocean’s set would not be livestreamed online, making it the only show not aired. After swathes of fans crowded towards his stage in the hours leading to his show, he emerged nearly an hour after the scheduled time.

Despite a deluge of social media panic, information reported in the days following Ocean’s set partially explains the confusion. Rolling Stone and TMZ reported that Ocean sprained his ankle while biking in the days before the show, meaning the Coachella staff had to redesign his set at the last minute.

Online speculation and aerial footage of an ice rink set had many fans convinced that they were going to see “Ocean on Ice,” and reports from Coachella insiders confirmed that the rink and Olympic figure skaters were both part of the original show but got cut at the last minute. Unfortunately, Frank’s reported injury meant this glacial galavant had to be reworked, forcing the Coachella staff to deconstruct the approved set, melt the entire ice rink, and redesign the set with Frank’s new idea on the day of the show.

This is supposed to explain the lack of energy and hour-long delay, but something doesn’t seem right, considering Ocean didn’t mention the issue once during his show. And fans are still left wondering why the show wasn’t live streamed on YouTube. With Ocean obstructing himself from view both for the crowd and camera for most of the performance, many fans were left disappointed by his return. Due to the lack of effort and the assumed fortune Ocean made for headlining, he’s received unprecedented backlash for the show. To no one’s surprise, he pulled out of his Coachella week two performance days after the show.

Despite Ocean’s reported injury, a lot of the backlash was justified. It seemed like he didn’t want to be there, hardly speaking between the first few songs and hiding behind a blue hooded jacket, but after a few tracks, he slightly opened up. His first statement addressed the ever-looming demand for more music, cryptically declaring, “I want to talk about why I’m here because it’s not because of a new album.… Not that there’s not a new album.” He later reminisced about “one of [his] fondest memories,” seeing Rae Sremmurd at Coachella with his late little brother, who died at just 18 in a car accident three years ago.

The 24 tracks Ocean delivered reached high highs and low lows: demonstrating that era-defining talent doesn’t fade away, even after six years, but also chopping up some of his most beloved tunes into awkward dance tracks. At one point, he gave the reins to DJ Crystallmess, who played a ten-minute dance mix of Ocean’s songs as a security guard twerked and Ocean paraded around the stage with the green baby from the 2021 Met Gala. For “Nights” and “Nikes,” Frank just listened along, lip-syncing the lyrics without holding a microphone. And at one point, he welcomed a kid named Josiah to the stage to play his “inner child,” Josiah then lip-synced as Ocean sang Willie Nelson’s “Night Life.”

Ocean’s show just kept getting weirder for the fans watching along as he abruptly walked off stage, paused for a moment, then announced, “Guys, I’m told it’s curfew, so that’s the end of the show.” The fans remained with feet glued to the ground, repeatedly chanting “one more song” for minutes, but just like that, he was gone.

Ocean’s first performance in six years was always going to make headlines — it was just a question of whether they’d be positive or negative. At first, fans were uproariously bitter about being denied access to the livestream and let down by Ocean’s apparent lack of effort, but reports of an ankle injury and a scrapped ice rink left us all wondering what could have been.