VANCOUVER – It took a big favour (shout out to Steve), but I recently had a chance to screen Brian Kinnes’ “found concert footage” film of Frank Ocean at Coachella. The Rebuild Cut, as it’s called, made a brief splash with Ocean’s fans and, eventually, with Coachella’s parent company AEG a few weeks ago, after Brian posted it for free online. Constructed using cellphone footage that was uploaded to YouTube and TikTok in the wake of his controversial headline set, the film takes a Gestalt approach to concert filmography, in which the sum is considerably greater than the individual parts. Various guerilla camera angles are stitched and remixed together until previously static shots feel dynamic and, at times, cinématique.
While fans applauded Brian for sifting through the silt to find the few gems buried in Frank’s roughly 90-minute performance, AEG was less enthusiastic, threatening the NYC-based editor with legal action and even launching a barrage of copyright strikes aimed at blowing both the film and the cellphone footage used to make it off of the world wide web. It was an overwhelmingly successful campaign. Within days, The Rebuild Cut was essentially reduced to rubble, its legacy little more than a series of dead links on Twitter and Reddit. In the fallout, Brian found himself thrust, albeit briefly, into the national spotlight. He addressed AEG saying he had never profited off The Rebuild Cut, and that the film’s existence was, in his mind, justified under fair use. Lawyers were called. And for a second, it seemed the momentum might even shift in Brian’s favour. The story was covered by no less than The FADER, The LA Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and Joe Rogan (“How could they sue him?”). But after a few days of casually trying to bait Coachella, Brian’s Twitter feed returned to regularly scheduled programming: upcoming projects, his fondness for Jonathan Glazer, a link to his Letterboxd.
His personal website currently lists The Rebuild Cut as “unavailable to the public.” But of course, that’s not entirely true.
The internet is, after all, forever.
Three decades after AOL dial-up brought the web to America’s living room, celebrities and corporations alike continue to learn this unshakeable tenet the hard way. In 2003, Barbra Streisand tried to wipe a photo of her cliff-top mansion from the internet’s collective memory. Instead the photo was shared widely. Thousands of people thumbed their nose at the Funny Girl, to the point that this specific social phenomenon - attempting to suppress something so hard that you paradoxically lead more people to see it – is now known as The Streisand Effect. And Babs is hardly the only one who’s been burned. Beyoncé, who has collaborated with Frank, famously tried for years to have an unflattering photo of herself removed from the web. Like Streisand, her protests simply ensured the image was shared more widely. And while it’s unclear whether Frank agrees with AEG’s decision to obliterate Brian’s cut, the fact remains that doing so arguably spurred more interest in the project than had previously existed.
The irony is that The Rebuild Cut uses a template that was championed in no small part by Frank Ocean himself. As a behind-the-scenes songwriter struggling to transition into a proper solo artist, Ocean defied conventional industry wisdom by releasing his breakthrough 2011 mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra, for free via Tumblr. He had a few reasons for doing this, but among them was the fact that the album was composed using several uncleared samples, including music originally by Coldplay, MGMT, and the Eagles. In other words, Frank took copyrighted material and repurposed it under a similar argument of fair use. Twelve years later, the samples of some of his most popular songs (Strawberry Swing, American Wedding) remain uncleared. Because of this, his big breakthrough can’t be heard in full on any conventional streaming service, forcing fans to source the tracks via slightly shadier sources.
And yet you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Given his distribution strategy for Nostalgia, ULTRA, it should be no surprise that a bootleg economy has sprung up around Frank, one that has grown larger in his absence. Fans curate master lists of official and unofficial releases, sharing links to blogs and other corners of the internet in an endless scavenger hunt. It’s simple supply and demand economics. You can only listen to Channel Orange so many times before you crave a new sound. Case in point: a few days after Brian shared The Rebuild Cut, a song featuring Frank and ROSALÍA from 2020 leaked and was circulated widely.
But while the Frank Ocean brand is basically too big to fail at this point, the same cannot be said for Frank Ocean the performer. Though it captures his Coachella performance in a generous light, there is little redemption to be found in The Rebuild Cut. Frank’s set remains unpolished and poorly paced, his nearly flawless vocal performance cut short by a series of unexpected musical twists and unnecessary diversions including a 12-minute DJ set by CRYSTALLMESS, an appearance from his “inner child,” and the unfortunate decision to deploy pre-recorded vocals on several of his biggest tracks (Nikes, Nights). The result is a scattered mess that isn’t so much bad as it is boring. If he had simply taken one of those ideas and refined it, things might have been different. Instead, he tried to give us a bit of everything, until it all blended into nothing.
Though not the resurrection he maybe hoped for, it’s possible that we look back on Coachella 2023 as a sort of rebirth for the man originally born Christopher Edwin Breaux. As he told us at the end of his last studio album, Blonde, “I’m just a guy, I’m not a god.” For once, I think even his most passionate fans are inclined to agree. Frank Ocean was not playing 5D chess that night in Indio, California. He was playing checkers, and he still lost. The only upside is that expectations have never been lower.
He can only go up from here.
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