Do you just not go outside your house? Do you not drive your car because of the statistics? How else are you limiting your life for fear?" They could do the same just because I'm American. But they could do the same just because I'm black. Somebody could commit a hate crime and hurt me. Me putting Nostalgia out … what's physically going to happen? Me saying what I said on my Tumblr last week? Sure, evil exists, extremism exists. Afraid of things that don't necessarily merit fear. "People are just afraid of things too much. "I won't touch on risky, because that's subjective," he says. Giving away his first album Nostalgia, Ultra for free was a risk (he put it online in 2011 without the knowledge of his label, Def Jam). Packing up, broke, and driving away from his hometown of New Orleans, post-Katrina, to give it a shot as a songwriter in LA was a risk. It could be argued with conviction that he's already eclipsed them. He emerged from two worlds: he was a successful songwriter for the likes of Brandy, Justin Bieber and Beyoncé and he ran with Odd Future, though always seemed more mature than their mouthier shock tactics. There's a sense that impulse has driven Frank Ocean's career so far. He's 24, relatively new to all of this, and suddenly the world wants to know his business. He shuffles into a dressing room behind Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom nursing a herbal tea, and plays with it nervously, a hoodie wrapped around his neck like a scarf, before politely shaking my hand, all the time avoiding eye contact. He's suddenly the most talked-about man in music, though he hasn't yet done much of the talking himself. You can understand why Ocean might be feeling a little stunned. "I don't know what happens now, and that's alrite," he wrote. Then there was the post on Tumblr in which he told, beautifully, the story of falling in love for the first time, with a man. There's the surprise release of his second album Channel Orange, a week before it was officially planned, which met with rabidly enthusiastic reviews comparing his idiosyncratic, narrative-heavy reimagining of soul and R&B to Prince and Stevie Wonder. But also awesome." Two things have contributed to making his week awesome. "Yes," he says, smiling, with a barely perceptible shake of the head, as if in mild disbelief.
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