LOS ANGELES — Frank Ocean stood on the main stage at Coachella on Sunday night wearing an ice-blue parka, his hair under a black durag and fuzzy slides on his feet, and told the crowd of tens of thousands that he wanted to explain why he was there.
When was the last time you heard an artist justify their presence in front of you? The reason, as always, seemed axiomatic: Ocean was performing because that's what performers do.
Except actually he hasn't for years: Ocean's headlining set here was his first concert since 2017, the year after he released his most recent album, "Blonde," a personal and ambitious set of broadly defined soul music that helped set the path for much that came after it. Since then he's thrown parties, worked on radio shows and tended to a luxury-goods brand in addition to releasing a string of singles. (He was set to headline Coachella in 2020 before it was canceled due to the pandemic.) But what drew him back to this stage, he said — after making clear with a laugh that he didn't have a hotly anticipated new album ready quite yet — was the fact that "my brother and I, we came to this festival a lot," including one year he fondly remembered when the two of them danced to the hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd.
