The Lone Wiseman
By Conor Johnson
It begins with a solo electric guitar, the twanging sound vibrating back and forth as if it were tuning in and out of focus on an old radio. The first five strums are the same discordant pitch, burrowing into the most primal part of your skull. You stand there, enraptured, as this blaring yet melodic sound continues to intensify.
Then, Frank Ocean begins to sing. “Wiseman closes mouth / Madman closes fist / Young man shows his age / Judge man named it sin.” The voice cuts clear and pure above the vibrato of the guitar, also burrowing into your skull but less harshly, a bore hole made with love. As the song builds up around him, with strings and synths coalescing into a crescendo, Ocean’s voice remains steady, a single rock jutting out from the crashing din of the surrounding waves.
As the song fades out, a muted synth underlies Ocean’s mysterious, questioning, thought-provoking last words: “I bet your mother would be proud.” It ends as abruptly as it began, the echo of the final guitar strum still ringing in your ears as you realize there is nothing more to hear. You feel chills, a combination of nostalgia and loneliness and pain and beauty and awe, primal emotions that overwhelm your nervous system.
You click the backwards white arrows, and the experience begins anew.
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Wiseman is not a popular song. This is not because it is bad – plenty of god-awful songs are popular – but probably because Ocean, whose real name is Christopher Breaux, never officially released it. He originally created the song for Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie Django Unchained, a match seemingly made in Hollywood heaven. Both works touch on themes of raw, primitive survival, analyzing the savage outer boundaries of the human experience, but it is clear Ocean does a better job. As one reviewer put it: “[Wiseman] is a great example of a three-minute song saying more than a nearly three-hour movie.”
Ocean, who is queer, also critiques masculinity in Wiseman, reflecting on societal expectations and the impact they have. Django, however, promotes many of the norms Ocean challenges, an indicator that this Hollywood match might not have been so perfect after all. Unsurprisingly, Tarantino ultimately cut the song from the final product, claiming there was not a proper scene for it and that quickly inserting Ocean’s track would “cheapen his effort.”
It seemed as if Ocean’s poetic masterpiece would never make its way to the light of day, a forgotten relic left to slowly sink to the bottom of the sea. Ocean is not the type of musician to give anyone insight into his creative process or personal life. He is one of few superstars who values privacy and absence in an era of ubiquity, his name scrubbed from tabloid headlines dominated by stars of a similar caliber. Also, as a self-admitting perfectionist, Ocean is unlikely to disseminate anything to the general public that doesn’t precisely fit his original intent. Since the song was intended to be paired with Django, Ocean would seemingly keep Wiseman under wraps, hobbled by itself.
Nevertheless, Ocean persisted, believing the song to be stronger than the movie it was designed to fit. A few months after the release of his wildly successful 2012 album Channel Orange, he posted the track to his Tumblr blog, summarizing his thoughts into one succinct comment: “django was ill without it.”
Ocean structures the lyrics of Wiseman to correlate with their meaning – a song that discusses primeval instinct must speak like primeval instinct. He only uses two articles (“a,” “the”) throughout the entire song, opting for eloquent caveman talk. You can imagine the lyrics painted on a wall somewhere in southern France, or on the wall of an elementary classroom. Most sentences are composed of maybe four words.
But the lyrics are beautiful, rife with striking lines and all that other literary jazz that makes meaning out of subtlety and comparison. During the bridge, Ocean sings, “The beast will crawl this Earth / then fall in the dirt to feed the crows / They’ll rip apart his flesh / till all that’s left is glorious bone.” It is the cycle of life, sung in a nostalgic tone that simultaneously praises and condemns the viciousness of natural selection. These lyrics also subtly discuss masculinity; Ocean references the “beast” men are expected to be ripped apart by the expectations of the metaphorical crows until only a pale shadow remains. He sings with a heartbroken passion that only could come from personal experience.
Even the sections of the song that don’t make sense are beautiful. During the bridge, when Ocean’s voice soars above a suddenly quiet smattering of piano and guitar, he sings, “Maybe hearts were made to pump blood / Maybe lungs were made for flood.” The last line of the two always struck me. Even after my 100th listen, after tossing around vague notions of free will and basal function in my head and after vainly researching possible meanings, I still have no idea what exactly Ocean is trying to say. Apparently other people agree – it is the only lyric in the song without a corresponding Genius annotation. Perhaps it is intentionally nonsensical, meant to temporarily startle the listener and sharpen their focus. Perhaps it has a private meaning only Ocean can fully understand. Like Ocean himself, the lyric is shrouded in mystery, an enigma that only piques even more interest.
People are also interested in Frank Ocean because of his unique position in the music world. Although he is classified by most critics and fans as an R&B singer (Ocean himself hates this label), he is a prominent part of the LA-based rap collective Odd Future and features on numerous rap songs. Ocean revealed the fact that he is gay or bisexual following the release of Channel Orange, which included a number of lyrics hinting at his sexuality. Ocean did this through a Tumblr post, writing “4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19. He was too.”
As one of a miniscule pool of queer men in the hip-hop world, Ocean is thrust into the spotlight, expected to speak on a whole number of related issues. He shies away from public commentary, but Ocean does bring up the theme of toxic masculinity – an issue of particular prominence in the hip-hop world – numerous times in his songs. His most recent album, Blonde, is spelled “blond” on the cover, emphasizing the fluidity of gender within a world that sees “blond” as masculine and “blonde” as feminine. On the song “Bad Religion,” off Channel Orange, Ocean sings “This unrequited love / To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult / And cyanide in my Styrofoam cup / I can never make him love me.” In numerous videos, including for the song “Nikes,” Ocean’s face is painted with a combination of glitter and striking black eyeliner.
Nowhere is this theme more pronounced, however, than on Wiseman. The word “man” is used 14 times in the first 14 lines of the song, as Ocean describes wise men, weak men, strong men, good men, sad men, and many others. At one point, Ocean sings, “Sad man cannot cry in place where man can see / Never witnessed father weep / The old man thought it weak.” Ocean is demonstrating how environment breeds a cult of masculinity, passed down from father to son to grandson, a gnarled, poisoned heirloom.
The primal nature of the song only amplifies Ocean’s message. Hypermasculinity is often (and incorrectly) seen as a product of men’s primal nature – the way we were born, not the way we were taught. Ocean, however, challenges this notion, arguing that primality is exactly why hypermasculinity is irrelevant – all of these stereotypes of strong men and weak men are products of society rather than an outward manifestation of some basal biological pathway, and are therefore completely wrong. Ocean sings, “But strong man don’t exist / No undying man exists / Weak man don’t exist no / Just flesh and blood exists.” All we are is flesh and blood, rendering any posturing or social grouping based on theoretical “manly” characteristics idiotic.
Ocean is a welcome voice of change in an industry often dominated by toxic masculinity. Many rappers have come under criticism for the use of homophobic slurs in their songs. Many rap songs in general are defined by sexual desire, a different kind of supposedly carnal instinct. The gist is often the same: man sees woman at club, talks about wanting her, etc. In a heteronormative culture where masculinity relies on notions of sexual prowess, these songs reinforce stereotypes of men constantly thinking about sex with women. But they have fundamental, crucial misunderstandings about what behavior is inherent and genomic, and what is culturally passed down. Ocean is right with Wiseman – basal instinct is about survival, about primates sharpening tools in jungles and dead beasts being fed on by crows, not some pathetic excuse to justify harassment.
Wiseman challenges, rather than reinforces, stereotypes of what men are supposed to be, breaking the oft-repeated dichotomy of strong vs. weak and other labels men assign each other. Men aren’t weak because they cry and express emotion, but they aren’t strong either: they simply are. Ocean argues that men should be allowed to be whatever they want – there is no one “right” way for a man to act.
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Although Tarantino never used Wiseman in his movie, a 2015 film called Southpaw decided the song would be perfect for its script. Southpaw is about a boxer named Billy who loses his career and wife in an altercation, but eventually uses boxing to come back and reconnect with his daughter. The movie is rife with stinky masculinity. Its poster is a jacked Jake Gyllenhaal with Rachel McAdams sitting on his lap, and the ultimate lesson of the film seems to be that fighting is an appropriate response to ward off your problems that occurred as a result of fighting. It’s an ironic and somewhat depressing twist that Wiseman, a song that so poignantly tackles the pitfalls of hypermasculinity, was officially released in the context of a work that only augments what the song seeks to redefine.
There is a singular line Ocean repeats throughout Wiseman, a chorus composed of one jarring lyric Southpaw’s writers should have paid attention to: “I bet your mother would be proud.” Ocean is exquisitely sarcastic. His voice is a piercing dart, making the listener reflect on masculinity by asking a deeply disconcerting and personal question: What would your mother think? The song vanishes into oblivion after 3 minutes and 52 seconds, but the question lingers long after the last strum has faded away.