ABSTRACT
Frank Ocean released his full-length album, Blonde, in August 2016. As the follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2012 debut Channel Orange, Blonde entered the Billboard album charts at the number one position and received glowing reviews from fans and critics. The many lyrical references to marijuana throughout Blonde suggest an analytical perspective for making sense of the album's musical eclecticism. By considering how the lyrics and other musical parameters function together, Blonde can be conceived as the musical representation of marijuana high. Lyrical references to marijuana/pot/weed are so prevalent throughout Blonde that critics Tricia Kilbride and Martha Tesema have diagnosed, what they call, "Blonde's weed fixation." For many users, the experience of "temporal disintegration" suggests a sort of "opening up" where time is experienced spatially, creating a sense of the "here-and-now." As the marijuana user's sense of personal time drifts from geophysical time, the user is able to explore aspects of the "here-and-now" in depth.
