{"id":109,"date":"2018-04-29T13:07:29","date_gmt":"2018-04-29T17:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/?p=109"},"modified":"2018-04-29T13:20:51","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T17:20:51","slug":"an-ode-to-moon-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/uncategorized\/an-ode-to-moon-river\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ode to Moon River"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard for me to write about Valentine\u2019s Day. It\u2019s not that someone I\u2019d been dating broke up with me on that day. February 14th<\/sup> doesn\u2019t carry, for me, ironic associations with heartbreak. It\u2019s precisely my distance from the significance of this day that leaves me squinting at my screen in an effort to describe my feelings towards it. I mean, I do enjoy chocolates, and cute little notes, and wearing red. But I don\u2019t need capitalism to remind me to love people, I\u2019ve never had a day off on February 14th, and flowers die easily once my cat gets involved. Most times I just don\u2019t get it. Shouldn\u2019t it be a problem that we rely on one day of the year to guarantee the exchange of love? If we prioritize love on that one day aren\u2019t we thereby conceding that we don\u2019t prioritize love on the remaining 364 days? Time is fleeting and should not be the thing that compassion and romance leans on. It\u2019s fine china teetering atop a base of even finer china. It makes me question the notion of love as a whole. Then, enter February the 15th of this year, when I discovered that Frank Ocean had released a new single, his cover of Mancini and Mercer\u2019s \u201cMoon River.\u201d\"\"<\/p>\n

There I was, sitting in my common room, finishing up homework with my entrymates, when I received a notification on my phone: \u201cNew upload from Frank Ocean — \u2018Moon River.\u2019\u201d Aw, shit.<\/em> I saw the red \u00a0cover art and knew that I was in for it. I tore out my headphones from my pj\u2019s and couldn\u2019t make it past one minute of the song before retreating to my room to listen to it in silence, where no one could catch me in my feels. The thing that struck me the most after repeatedly listening to the tune was the way in which Frank was able to work me up, even though he had dropped his cover the night after<\/em> Valentine\u2019s Day, and even knowing that the song, from Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em>, had more to do with striving to become a successful artist than with romantic love,. There\u2019s significance in trying to tackle this number as a love ballad, but how so?<\/p>\n

It goes back to how Ocean manipulates a song that never uses the word \u201clove,\u201d and it helps to refer to Nietzsche\u2019s thoughts on the autonomy of language to place that significance in context. The late nineteenth-century philosopher postulated that language serves to project meanings into a gap, in that no object, person, or event dictates the way we name or describe it. And if we follow that line of thought, then the fundamental human drive is that of forming metaphors and making the world more dream-like.[1]<\/sup><\/a> Love, along with all other concepts, would be the making equal of unequal things; love, with all of its empty heaviness, would be an illusion.[2]<\/sup><\/a> And I\u2019m okay with that! At least, in that the circumlocutory use of the word \u201clove\u201d would be the technique to practice in order to make the concept more real. In that sense, Frank Ocean does a fine job of reworking the delivery and production of \u201cMoon River\u201d in order to convey more heartfelt emotion, and perhaps call out all the loners out there, post Valentine\u2019s Day. But why should we care about the ways in which Frank Ocean manages to make love more real?<\/p>\n

\"\"If you\u2019re unfamiliar with Frank Ocean as an artist, it\u2019s hard for me to believe you, but I would encourage you to take a break right here and give him a listen before we move forward (\u201cSolo,\u201d \u201cIvy,\u201d \u201cPink + White,\u201d and \u201cThinkin Bout You\u201d would be my personal favorites, while his feature on \u201cSlide\u201d is bound to make anyone get their groove on). One of my friends on campus cites Frank as \u201cone of the greatest things to have been made in the U.S.,\u201d and I can\u2019t help but nod my head vigorously every time I hear him say that. Rising out of an era in 2010s hip-hop where rap needed to hit hard and make you grit your teeth from the taste of testosterone (looking at you, Kanye), Frank came on the scene willing to strip everything down to its core. Ocean lives in metaphor, writing lyrics that leave most moody adolescents and young adults repeating them for the sake of how they sound rather than their significance as prose. His beats are simple, his raps are melodic, and he\u2019s willing to manipulate his voice, the synthesizer, and electric guitar in low key but successful ways. He\u2019s not afraid to make you feel emotional, kind of like the old Drake? Although that would be insulting to Ocean (as Christian Thorne professed last semester, \u201cIt\u2019s the end of hip-hop. You\u2019ve got an aggressively bland Canadian running the game.\u201d), so maybe something closer to Lauryn Hill. Frank is more of that lay-back, smoke-a-joint, call-your-mom kinda vibe. So, once again, how does Ocean manage to make love more real?<\/p>\n

We can start by looking at the cover art for \u201cMoon River.\u201d At first glance, it\u2019s hard to make out what\u2019s being depicted — a red crow? A menacing pair of eyes? The Batman symbol? But if you look closely at the top of the image, the pieces start to come together. The title, \u201cMoon River,\u201d is printed in a bold red, with hearts hanging off of the edges of most of the letters. In the left corner of the cover, there\u2019s a small figure with the labelled anatomy of the human body. After finding a zoomed-in image of the figure online, it\u2019s shown that the label for the brain reads: \u201cOrigin of tingling sensation.\u201d It\u2019s a curious description, but given the context, the figure could very well be mapping the bodily responses towards seeing a loved one. For the top of the spine, the \u201ctingling sensation\u201d then becomes \u201cDescribed as moving downwards, following the line of the spine. May also feel this in the shoulders.\u201d And finally, for the arms, their label reads: \u201cSensation may spread to other areas with increasing intensity, typically the limbs and lower back.\u201d So there it is, Frank is coming on the scene and getting right down to it — real love can produce a physical response throughout most of the body, but which area is missing a description? The main image on the cover of the single — the heart. So hopefully, on the day after Valentine\u2019s Day, Frank will be able to send a tingling sensation through listener\u2019s hearts with his cover of \u201cMoon River.\u201d Now, let\u2019s move on to the meat of it — the song itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"I\u2019m hesitant to declaim my take on the original version of \u201cMoon River,\u201d since\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em>. But from what I can tell, Audrey Hepburn sang that song in the film with a subtle, whispery voice to express her aspirations towards fame, which makes Frank Ocean\u2019s more sentimental twist on it all the more impressive, to differentiate between love for entertainment and love for a person. With Ocean, \u201cMoon River\u201d begins with him counting his listeners in with a sharp \u201cone, two\u201d before they are greeted by steady bass guitar chord progressions and Frank\u2019s auto tuned falsetto. Ocean then begins to long after \u201cMoon River, wider than a mile \/ I\u2019m crossing you in style someday.\u201d The sudden shift from a major to a minor key as he sings the two words, \u201cMoon River,\u201d pierces the ears just enough for listeners to feel the reverberating high pitch cling onto their heartstrings and reach their toes. On \u201cwider than a mile,\u201d Frank layers his natural voice over his auto tuned one, allowing listeners to feel the breadth of his sentiments before he switches back to falsetto on \u201cI\u2019m crossing you in style.\u201d Listeners hear his natural voice only at the end of the lyric: \u201c– someday,\u201d emphasizing the solitude and hesitancy with which an Ocean would contemplate crossing a River. Frank chooses to center his listeners on the lament of this ballad, mixing his voice over itself and echoing it in and out so that they can feel him along the shadowy waters of his romantic life. Just the first verse of Ocean\u2019s song asks listeners to take in what is being sung, to question what is not being sung, and to identify which gaps are being filled with the alternating sounds of his voice. Without even knowing who or what Moon River is — it really could be a river illuminated by the light of the moon — Frank sings the opening of a song that is painful, unexpected, and entrancing, a love at first listen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For the remainder of the ballad, Ocean uses his natural voice, but continues to play around with the layering of his vocals to accentuate the lyrics. The second verse of the song speaks of \u201ctwo drifters off to see the world,\u201d and Frank ends the verse by omitting the word \u201crainbow\u2019s\u201d from \u201cWe\u2019re all chasing after all the same \/ Chasing after our rainbow\u2019s end.\u201d Our end is suddenly shifted from critical acclaim and material wealth — a stereotypical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — to the person with whom we can spend the rest of our lives with. But perhaps the most powerful point in Frank\u2019s cover is his later repetition of the first verse. Just after he sings \u201cChasing after our end,\u201d his voice begins to swell, with different trills of his voice overlapping over each other before reaching the climax: Ocean cries out \u201cMoon River\u201d again, but with his natural voice at a powerfully high pitch, with a slight vibrato that almost mimics the shakiness of someone sobbing. And all the while, the trills continue, his sound alternating in timbre and pitch, t<\/p>\n

he inner voices of his love calling out. It makes my heart well up before the raw emotion escapes through my eyes. Just those three seconds can fill me with the sentiment that no four-letter word could handle. It\u2019s a real weight that is being pressed upon you. A sinking, heavy feeling, something smothering in its beauty. Most is said in what Frank Ocean leaves unsaid, in the words he creates through the pure trills that escape through his throat. What better way to describe the way the heart feels love than to reimagine a piece of music that can enact intense emotion in its listeners? Frank, frankly, knows how to leave language alone and make concepts real through the real sensations that we as humans feel. Isn\u2019t that what love is all about?<\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,<\/em> 1873, 121.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> Nietzche, 117.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s hard for me to write about Valentine\u2019s Day. It\u2019s not that someone I\u2019d been dating broke up with me on that day. February 14th doesn\u2019t carry, for me, ironic associations with heartbreak. It\u2019s precisely my distance from the significance … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1826,"featured_media":114,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1826"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}