Frank Ocean gets the NY Times treatment as they write an in-depth cover story, the article details a number of topics from both his music career and life. You can read a portion of it below, that discusses Frank’s label situation pre-Channel Orange, POST Nostalgia, Ultra.
Ocean took to Twitter to get a few things off his chest: “I woke up today feeling like all my followers should know that . . . my record label slept on me . . . i. did. this. not ISLAND DEF JAM. that’s why you see no label logo on the artwork that I DID. guess its my fault for trusting my dumbass lawyer and signing my career over to a failing company. [expletive] Def Jam & any company that goes the length of signing a kid with dreams & talent w/no intention of following through . . . now back to my day. I want some oatmeal and toast.”
Ten days later, Ocean would be in the studio with Beyoncé, at her invitation, to collaborate on a track for her album “4.”
Barry Weiss, who had just taken over as the chairman and chief executive of Island/Def Jam, invited Ocean to a meeting at his office in New York in April 2011 in an effort to get to know him. (Some at Ocean’s own label hadn’t even realized, at first, that Frank Ocean and Lonny Breaux were one and the same.) “He felt sort of unappreciated,” Weiss told me, putting it mildly.
As “Nostalgia” continued to gain attention, Ocean’s team would call Weiss to demand more money for Ocean’s follow-up record, “Channel Orange.” “Frank was so bullish and so optimistic and so confident about the album that he was creating that he had his representatives call us up and say that he deserves a lot more money,” Weiss says. “I don’t believe that I had actually heard anything at that point. But we did something atypical, that most labels I don’t think would do. We stepped up. We wrote the check. Virtually album-unheard, sight-unseen, we believed so much in this guy that we actually wrote the check.” Ocean has claimed in the past that he demanded $1 million. When I asked about that, Weiss said only, “I plead the fifth.”
read the full item HERE.
