“You represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art.
“Black stardom is rough,” Chris Rock once said. There are precedents for this sort of thing, for disappearances, for the self-implosion of black genius. He could be the dynamic human of the future, exploding age-old binaries with an eloquent note, melting racial divisions with a devastating turn of phrase or quick flit to falsetto. Then he became the story-an avatar for all of our fluid modern ideals. At first, Frank Ocean was simply a great storyteller.
