Frank Ocean Jolts Coachella Festival With Aimless, WTF Headlining Set

variety.com:

Jeff Miller Sunday night’s Coachella-headlining performance by the enigmatic R&B star Frank Ocean was unquestionably the most highly-anticipated set of the festival: Ocean who had not performed live in nearly six years, was set to headline the fest in 2020 before the pandemic hit, and then again last year before he postponed it to 2023.

Rumors swirled beforehand about the likelihood of new music (Ocean hasn’t released an album since 2016’s “Blonde”) the potential for a reunion with his Odd Future bandmates, and the odds of a performance as moving and revelatory as the last time Ocean played Southern California, at a near-universally lauded headlining set at the now defunct FYF festival during his brief tour in the summer of 2017.

None of this came to pass. In fact, Ocean’s set — during which he and his musicians were intentionally obscured by a cadre of people walking in a circle around them, only seen on video projected on custom screens even more massive than those that usually compose the Coachella stage — was messy, loose, and a near-disaster that will likely go down as one of the most divisive in Coachella history, with flashes of brilliance that only made for a frustrating final outcome: that of disappointment and palpable audience WTF-ness. (Unlike nearly every other set at the festival, Ocean’s, and that of Bjork, who preceded him on the main stage, were not livestreamed — a fact that did not become clear until Sunday evening, leading to outrage and anguish online; reps for YouTube, Coachella and the two artists did not immediately respond to Variety‘s requests for comment.) Problems were apparent from the jump: the set started a full 57 minutes after its advertised start time, eating into a hard curfew for the