Unreleased promo videos for ‘Blonde/Boys Don’t Cry’ surface online
Left: Ysham Jackson; Frank Ocean.
Two unreleased promotional reels for Frank Ocean’s August 2016 album and magazine, Blonde and Boys Don’t Cry, have appeared on Vimeo from an unknown source.
The first clip (the so-called “haircut promo”) is a minute long and shows model Ysham Jackson getting his blonde hair cut, swimming in a pool, and sitting on the beach, alongside copies of the zine and an unreleased beach towel featuring the Blonde/Boys Don’t Cry logotype. Images captured by Ocean during this session appeared in his photo spread “Tush” for Print, “Issue One,” a magazine by Christopher Simmonds and Frans Burns, released in January 2017.
The second video (the so-called “interview promo”) features a split-screen of two camera angles, both capturing Ocean sitting in a chair in an empty room and speaking to someone off-screen. Ocean discusses his experience producing Blonde and Boys Don’t Cry over the two-and-a-half-minute clip. His statements are spliced together with little context, and the interviewer’s questions are cut from the conversation. One of the questions appears to have been about which superpowers Ocean wishes he had, as asked in Mikey Alfred’s 2012 Q&A “Hopes and Dreams,” featured in Boys Don’t Cry and the Blonde track “Futura Free.” The unusual editing (if not a deliberate artistic decision) may suggest the video was not intended for release in its present form. It is unclear when Ocean filmed the interview, although the date likely falls between April 2015 and August 2016, spanning from when he first announced his follow-up to Channel Orange (then known only as Boys Don’t Cry) to when he released both his albums (Endless and Blonde) and magazine. Some fans have speculated that this promo is footage from a larger, unreleased documentary by Ocean that follows him through the projects’ development, although this alleged film has never been corroborated by Ocean or his team.
Check out the videos and an interview transcript below.
“Haircut Promo,” fan re-upload.
“Interview Promo,” fan re-upload.
Interview Transcript:
Ight. Right now, I’m thinking that after, you know, said date, or said moment, or said thing occurs (Yeah)—right now, it just all feels like a build-up to that. I was thinking about this video, and I was like, man, filming for five days—this whole process has definitely made one thing clear. It’s like deejaying (Yeah), like the mix is always falling apart. You know, even when you feel like you’re ahead and you can chill, you can’t just chill; you gotta keep moving. […]
So, I should have said teleportation (Right), but I’m really interested in flying. I’m gonna say teleportation instead, but then it just ruins the joy of flying. […]
I think making this project, I haven’t shied away from expectations, you know. I’ve really tried to use it as fuel because people have a positive association of what I do and what I make, and they expect something that’s good. So okay, how do you convert that into, like I don’t know, just a better moment, you know, a better song, a better album, a better presentation, you know—(Haha). […]
The most frustrating thing about the process of doing this is that there’s been a bunch of times, you know, where I’ve—I don’t know, you just feel like you just really f-cked up. You just f-cked it up somehow. It’s irreversible. It already happened; there’s nothing you can do about it, and you don’t know if moving on even makes it better, you know. But it’s just like, man—like, you’re gonna be here; you gotta keep moving, and you gotta move on. You gotta try, you know. You know what I think? You know, it’s like momentum. Momentum helps with that—(Haha). […]
You know, there’s no fantasy on this record, you know, on this… and yet it’s music; it’s all for better for worse like—autobiographical or just like my experience. Like, you know, the foundation of what’s made me who I am today. And in doing so, you know, you come out with this thing where, yeah, you do feel like you’ve defeated something. […]
I think I appreciate other people’s ideas more than ever now—right (Haha). Well, I do.
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