»Raw, fallible, and human«

Frank Ocean as confessional singer-songwriter in the digital age

Abstract

The article is based on the observation that, especially since the 2010s, the figure of the singer-songwriter seems to be experiencing a »revival« as a reference foil in musicians’ stagings of themselves and others. The idea of the solo artist inscribed in the figure is regularly invoked, whose musical representation evokes political commitment and emotional »involvement« precisely through its reduction. This development has certainly been reinforced by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan in 2016, but it is striking that the singer-songwriter figure has long been referred to beyond the white and male-connoted folk rock paradigm, into which it can be »fitted« relatively easily both in terms of musical aesthetics and ideology. In the recent past, more and more artists have been presented as singer-songwriters who are outside of this pattern. Using the example of the musician Frank Ocean, the aim is to show which new evaluation instances are used in the so-called Web 2.0 to make him addressable as a (confessional) singer-songwriter.