Withdrawal is a time-honoured pop tactic that only favours the very successful and the most alluring. In Ocean’s case, it fit his wish not to play the music industry game: previous difficulties with Def Jam Records have put him on the path to digital self-releasing – a practice he has used with his first mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra and his latest album (it’s written as Blond on the artwork, but has come to be spelled with an “e”). His wish not to be defined or to be pinned down, allied to his profligate talent, is reminiscent of Prince and, like that inspirational figure, he dictates his terms and defines his time.
The second track of Blonde, “Ivy”, begins with the briefest of tremolo guitar melodies, before the voice comes in crooning, “I thought that I was dreaming when you said you love me.” The rest of the chorus deals with the old duality of love and hate, “I could hate you right now / It’s quite alright to hate me now.” In the verse, Ocean gets down to the heart of it, “We didn’t give a f*** back then / I ain’t a kid no more / We’ll never be those kids again.”
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“Ivy” is constructed around two contrasting guitar figures: a simple beatless arrangement. The lyric is about memory – of a first love affair, a long-standing friendship now gone – related in a voice that is, at times, sped up to sound younger to fit the theme. “That was my version of collage or bricolage,” Ocean told the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica last November. “How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves, we know the story, we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.”
Like many Ocean songs, “Ivy” is at once direct and ambiguous: it takes you into the feeling but gives little away in terms of situation. The nonlinear approach encourages multiple meanings that reinforce his skill as a lyricist and pop artist. Everything flows into everything else within this oceanic world, yet it all fits together – right down to Christopher Edwin Breaux’s adoption of his nom-de-pop in 2010, five years after the salt water came in on his home town of New Orleans.
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