Among a great many other decisions, this was also the year that I decided to get a blackout Air conditioner. Near the end of winter, as every day began to feel even more identical, I decided that I was no longer invested in the newness of morning. For a moment, I craved a different illusion. I would wake up without an understanding of time, rather, look at the window and see if the light was pouring in or pouring out. It felt fitting, comforting, to sink into the endless black for some waking moments before groping around for my phone and squinting at the harsh light informing me that it was either time to get moving or time to fall back asleep if I could. In a cavernous year, I made my place of rest into a cavern.
The first time I heard Godspeed was last year, when the winter was bellowing its arrival, waiting in a car my friend said, “Let me play this song, it’ll break your heart” — it did — and the played Godspeed not too loud for the stereos to shiver at the beat, but instead, at a lower volume, one where it lets the song pour without the fear of flooding. We sat in the car quietly when the song played, until the third of its three minutes, when Frank bends his vocals into a whatever aching his heart leads them to. My friend then woke from his remembering and sighed saying, “I love how it's not meant to break your heart, but it still does.” This is the best way I have to explain Godspeed. Much like love, it isn’t meant to break us, but it still does, most times.
If I’m being honest, I love Frank Ocean for the ways he has fallen short of his desire more than I love him for how his desires have been met — that is, if they were ever met — I love him for the ruins of his heartbreak more than whatever love his heart wore into the cold night.
In the exhaustion of last fall, when I could feel the creeping breath of winter blowing at the newly barren trees and browning the once-fluorescent leaves, I desired — for a moment — an opportunity to step into the body of someone who appeared more joyful, more mentally and emotionally equipped than I was to deal with what had been and what was coming. My neighbor, who walked his dog every morning, smiling and waving at everyone he passed, with the galloping jaw of his dog sniffing every stranger as his way to make a friend. The person in the grocery store with fake airpods, affording a luxury to compensate for all the necessities he couldn’t. I envied the ability to emotionally ascend, even briefly, to a better place than I found myself in. Earlier that year, I wrote letters to a girl I would only meet on weekends; at parties when both of us would be drunk enough to trip into doing something we would not remember. I won’t say what letters I wrote to her, but all I will say is that we were lovers in the worlds we made in our head. We desired nothing more than what we already had. The deal was simple, we would not dance or kiss while dancing until we have had at least 5 shots and smoked up 2 Js. This was a hall pass to enter a fantasy world where anything and everything we did would not matter, the night would swallow all our secrets and come morning, we would embrace whatever new love awaited us.
The settlement was never documented, it was an unsaid agreement made by the bodies and not the heart. And yes, I am suggesting that these are not the same. And yes, whatever is the need of the heart is not the need of the body. And I like keeping it this way. I like being aware of what I need and what I want.
Frank Ocean was born Christopher Edwin Breaux in Long Beach, California. His first major appearance was as a vocalist in Kanye’s Watch the Throne featuring Jay Z for the songs “No Church in The Wild” and “Made In America,” which of course were major hits, but a less known fact is that Frank co-wrote those songs. And for his contributions had very little glory left in his palms.
There are several reasons to love Frank; his understanding of love; his outrageous vocals; his agonizingly painful lyrics that would rather have you wish love to those you also wish dead.
I love Frank for Godspeed. I love him for this song first and then for any other shattering he made music out of. Now before I wax my romantic poetics over this song, let me first tell you what this song meant to the artist who made it. This is also — as tradition — the part where I ask you to play the song right now and experience the glory it withholds.
This song was a re-imagined version of Frank Ocean’s boyhood, he wishes himself “Godspeed” on his journey into manhood here over a heavenly organ groove. Godspeed is the heart of Ocean’s breakthrough album “Blonde.” That, if you are a regular customer of soul and R&B, if not, this song resurfaced through tiktok, and gained the attention of now the Gen Z audiences.
In Blonde’s companion magazine Boys Don’t Cry, Ocean wrote:
“I wrote a story in the middle — it’s called ‘Godspeed.’ It’s basically a reimagined part of my boyhood. Boys do cry, but I don’t think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years. It’s surprisingly my favorite part of my life so far. Surprising, to me, because the current phase is what I was asking the cosmos for when I was a kid. Maybe that part had its rough stretches too, but in my rearview mirror it’s getting small enough to convince myself it was all good. And really though… It’s still all good.”
This shifts the landscape of the song altogether, making it a song about loving himself more than loving anyone else. I consumed this song differently ofcourse, as would anyone who did not first question the womb that gave birth to the song.
It bears mentioning that this song is the second last song on an album that is already bleeding and wonderfully visceral and that by the time it ends you might feel trapped in a room with no doors to walk out of — but a familiar one. A room where inescapability might have its appeal. Maybe because I am prone to isolation now and emotional wandering, I needed the constant reminders tethering me to the unkindness of the world. Balance, I suppose. I enjoy the consistency of my trappings. A day as dark at its opening as it was at its closing. A night as bright as my lovers warmth as it would be in her absence.
I consumed this song again with the same girl I would only love at the party, who I would vow to be beside only until the morning came and woke us all up from our drunk and insecure dreams.
But there was a night when none of us were drunk or high, and when we were decidedly pressed into each other on the dance floor. And then Frank oceaned Godspeed into a room filled with those who have ached once in the face of love and as the song spilled through the speakers that were too loud for the apartment but never loud enough for the party. I was in the arms of someone who I thought was not going to remember the surrender of my heart in this moment, and perhaps she was expecting the same, because as Frank sang his vow in the first verse;
“I will always love you, like I do,
I’ll let go of a prayer for you, just a sweet word
We looked at each other and knew that whatever our bodies needed is now what our hearts want, and that which cannot be granted. We knew that the party was over. We sunk into each other, our heads rested on eachothers shoulders as we swayed along the song, knowing this would be the last time we would feel each others touch.
I think of that of that moment, and think of the way my heart surrendered that night. For that brief moment, as long as the song lasted, love was only love, it was not me falling in or out of it, it was a home that was ready to keep me but also willing to wish me a new and better home.
And come morning, a corner of my world was pulled apart, but only a corner. And so I looked at her as she got into her uber and wished her Godspeed in finding whatever love she would choose for herself when the night falls again—whatever the sky can never take.
