In his Blonde album, released in 2016, Frank Ocean speaks to his own experiences with his masculinity and sexuality. His lyrics are filled with past musings and future aspirations, love, loss, hope, and pain. Frank Ocean’s lyrics can be read through the lens of Muñoz’s queer utopia in the way they imagine a future that is not yet here, something on the horizon. As Muñoz states, “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present,” a “longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in thre present,” “the thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (1).
Frank Ocean’s lyrics embody this type of active hope for a future that rejects the oppression of the present. In “Solo,” Ocean sings, “It’s hell on Earth and the city’s on fire. Inhale, in hell there’s heaven.” In these lyrics, Ocean acknowledges the brokenness of the present moment, but the potential for something beautiful to emerge from it. This lyric also speaks to Muñoz’s ideas of concrete utopias which are “relational to historically situated struggles” (3). What he imagines emerges from the current moment and is situated in reality, even when it imagines something new. It is a “heaven” that stems from the current “hell.”
His lyrics from “Seigfried” similarly evoke ideas of queer futurity and a concrete utopia. Ocean sings, “Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought That could think of the dreamer that thought That could think of dreaming and getting a glimmer of God I be dreaming a dream in a thought That could dream about a thought That could think about dreaming a dream where I can not, where I can not.” In these lyrics, Ocean conveys the way this dream builds upon itself, from previous dreams. Just like Muñoz’s ideas of concrete utopia, this dream for the future is “relational” and situated within a present context.
Frank Ocean’s lyrics also speak to queerness as “not simply a being but a doing for and towards the future” (1). In the song, “Pretty Sweet,” he sings, “To the end I’ll make it All the risk, I’ll take it.” In this line, Ocean asserts a determination to achieve this future and to take the risks needed to get there. His lyrics are rich with the potentiality that is needed to achieve Muñoz’s queer utopia.
