Panorama 2017 Gallery: A Tribe Called Quest, Solange, Frank Ocean & More
Photo Credit: Vickey Ford for Okayplayer
Photo Credit: Vickey Ford of Sneakshot for Okayplayer
In the interview, Ocean also talks about the most insane movie he's ever seen, wanting to build a family, and more.
Since leaving Def Jam back in 2016, Frank Ocean has occasionally discussed his split with the label in different interviews since then. The Blonde artist addressed the split in a new story for Dazed magazine.
READ: Nostalgia, Ultra: A Look At Frank Ocean's Vintage Intimacy
The story, which finds Ocean answering questions from other artists and creatives (John Waters, Nile Rodgers, Billy Porter, and Amandla Stenberg), includes a question from rapper JPEGMAFIA asking about the Def Jam situation.
"How did it feel fucking over a label like that? Old white niggas do that to us all the time, but how did it feel giving them a taste of their own elixir?" JPEG asked.
"You know, it's funny talking about it these days because I couldn't really tell anybody anything for a couple of years. Couldn't tell anyone at the label, obviously. But I also couldn't talk with anyone at Apple because the industry is too small and it would've gotten back to the label for sure. So I kept it to myself and a few in my circle," Ocean said. "I carried my hard drives around with me when I travelled because I used to not store anything online. Those drives became a physical representation of the stakes. If the files had leaked, everything would have worked out very differently for me. When August came around and both projects were uploaded I felt the euphoria, yeah, but mostly I just needed to sleep. I probably slept something like 15 hours."
The musician Cosima also asked a question related to the subject, asking Ocean if he had something of a blueprint to follow for his leave from Def Jam.
"Not exactly, no. I thought sometimes about what Steve Jobs did with NeXT," he said.
Elsewhere in the story, Nile Rodgers asked Ocean when Channel Orange is coming out on vinyl, to which he answered, "ASAP."
Read the rest of the interview here.
