Def Jam's contracted edition of Frank Ocean's Nostalgia, Ultra never materialized. The label nonetheless released two of the mixtape's songs as singles. One of them, "Novacane," clashed with everything else on the radio, reached the Top 20 of Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart, and crossed into the Hot 100. The singer's presence spread with appearances on Goblin, 4, Watch the Throne, and The OF Tape, Vol. 2. He then completed this album with Malay, Om'Mas Keith, and Pharrell as his co-producers. Journalists present at June pre-release listening events speculated that some of the lyrics revealed Ocean's bisexuality. Ocean subsequently published a screen shot of a document, dated December 27, 2011, that included details of a crushing romantic relationship with a male. Ocean also revealed that he wrote for the sake of his sanity and credited his inner circle: "I'm sure these people kept me alive, kept me safe." One listen to Channel Orange makes it obvious that he is as free as an artist as he is as a man….
Ocean's Kingdom is the fifth classical album by Paul McCartney. It is the score from the same-titled ballet, commissioned by the New York City Ballet. The ballet tells of a love story based in two fantastic worlds - the "pure" ocean kingdom, and the Earth kingdom with its "sort of baddies" who threaten the underwater way of life. According to McCartney, love happens when earth meets water, and "you'll have to see whether the couple make it". His score for the ballet consists of four orchestral movements
Since 2007's Precambrian, the Ocean has become increasingly conceptual. Two separate offerings from 2010, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, had longtime fans in a quandary as to whether the band were visionaries or merely pretentious. Over two years in the making, Pelagial was originally envisaged by guitarist, lyricist, and band mastermind Robin Staps as a single piece of instrumental music that charted the seven levels of the sea - Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic, Abyssopelagic, Hadopelagic, Demersal, and Benthic - by portraying their depths musically, from the surface where light enters (Epipelagic) to the murky, enclosed-in-darkness ocean floor (Benthic) where bottom feeders live. Staps was also influenced deeply by Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, a work that charts the journey of three men through a bleak (presumably post-apocalyptic) landscape to a room where all desires can be fulfilled…