Frank Ocean's new record, Blonde, exists in our world's grays; it's courageous for a black R&B album to live in the gray.

R&B has traditionally played with an unrealistic binary between a spurned lover and an over-confident Lothario. The master of adding nuance to that binary and crossing boundaries of content and presentation is Prince. Bomani Jones, a respected music critic and sports analyst wrote shortly after Prince's death that he was "man enough to sound like he wasn't." Prince's boundary-breaking steps in his early '80s career created new space for artists to explore both their feminine and masculine sides, to embrace the brash sonics of punk, to clear a dance floor with a ballad knowing the band will bring the audience back out for the next one. As a pioneer, Prince spent his career breaking that unfounded ground, affirming its financial and artistic viability and running the empire it created.

In Blonde I hear Frank walking around the space Prince created with a curiosity and detached, journalistic eye that can only come when someone else did the work of clearing the way. I hear a man who knows his audience lives in a world where black, white, rich, poor, gay and straight mix; it isn't Prince's imagined "Uptown" utopia. It's Frank's real world and it hurts. Sometimes black and white only mix in a body cam feed from a police officer. Sometimes poor and rich only mix at the parties they didn't expect to see each other at. Sometimes the gay kid struggles to explain his identity to his straight friends. But sometimes we sleep with each other, sometimes we drive across town together, we write a song together. And it feels good.

Frank captures this vast world using the smallest pen. His lyrics paint a picture of a reluctant narrator, seemingly numb to the world around him. Except we are hearing the songs Frank wrote, and there isn't an ounce of numb within them when taken as a whole. But line by line, it's a laundry list of relationships gone wrong, drugs done before they went wrong and the cloak of numbness America is trying on to cope with reality. His lyrical specificity and detail owes more to his rapping partners in Odd Future than to the broad, universal brushstrokes of most modern R&B. Based on Frank's lyrics, this is the record that puts the nail in the coffin of the idea that modern R&B and hip-hop should be considered as two distinct genres.

Frank has tapped other great voices and writers to be a part of the new record, often supplying minor support for the larger presence of Frank. Beyonce, Bon Iver and Kendrick Lamar all make micro-cameos that often require a rewind to actually identify as not being Frank Ocean. He also seems to be one of the few people who has Andre3000's phone number, and Andre shows up for his standard every-other-year cameo that confirms he's still one of the best in the game.

Sonically, Frank Ocean has a songwriter's willingness to utilize any combination of sounds to do service to the composition. Very few songs spend much time with a full production of drums, keyboard, samples, et cetera. If Frank can get the story across with a whistle and a detuned piano, he's willing to let the song ride on those characteristics alone. For the most part, Blonde features organ patches, reverb soaked guitars and occasionally deep, club-friendly drum loops. The most interesting development in production from Ocean's last album, 2012's Channel Orange, is in the vocal production. On Blonde, Ocean's voice is frequently pitch-shifted, auto-tuned and washed out to take on different tones at moments in the song. In Ocean's case, this production isn't in the service of creating an alter-ego, but rather to add more layers to his individual identity.

We owe a debt of gratitude and honor to Prince for breaking down walls and demanding attention and critical respect for black artists who refuse to work inside of genre lanes or outdated ideas of sexuality and identity. But once those walls were broken down, it wasn't always clear who followed and took up residence. I don't hear Prince in the catalogs of Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, Teddy Riley. The neo-soul movement that brought us Jill Scott, Maxwell, D'Angelo and Badu took Prince as an influence, but the absolute fearlessness tangible in Prince's catalog hasn't come through in any of those artists. It does with Frank Ocean.

Frank Ocean's work takes the pulse of where we are in America today. His inventive view of the gray America we are living in today both hurts and heals. It challenges the listener to interpret the often dispassionate voice Ocean uses as a narrator. The headlines aren't always good, but there's a story just in the fact that we're all singing along.

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• Album Review: Frank Ocean, 'Channel Orange'