I would like to tell you a story about my childhood. The year is 1994 and I, aged five, am at Disneyland Paris. My parents foolishly let me have a Robin Hood hat – the deep green felt one, with a red feather – and I am wearing it while strutting pompously across a bridge thinking I Am The Shit, like the harbinger of the goddamn Boss Baby. Suddenly a prophetic gust of wind comes out of nowhere, knocks the hat off my head and directly into the water. I don't actually remember this happening but it is captured forever on VCR and you can hear my parents creasing with laughter as grief settles for the first time upon my fat little face and it crumples into a james_van_der_beek_crying.gif. I die inside. I am born anew. I become: disappointed.
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This information is important because realistically nothing captures the depth of human disappointment more than a toddler believing they have become their favourite Disney character while at actual Disneyland Paris and having that dream blown away in an instant to the tune of two knowing chortles. Not even small-town Tinder is that depressing. And yet this disappointment, this disenchantment, this soaking wet flannel wrung upon the flame of the spirit paled in comparison to what happened to my feelings when Frank Ocean cancelled his set at Barcelona's Primavera Sound.Blond(e) is my favourite album of 2016, and 2017, and of the last five years, probably. I wrote at length about what it meant to me in terms of identity and sexuality here. The first time I heard "Self Control" it prompted me to drop my bags of shopping, cry in the street and want to hug a stranger. Suffice to say: I was crushed. Spiritually, emotionally and existentially flattened like an egg under an anvil. I quickly rocketed through all five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and tweeting. A part of me expected it, the same way you can anticipate being dumped. There were rumours and silences in telling places, cancelled sets for Sasquatch! and Hangout created a general air of suspicion and unease, and then, just days before Primavera was due to take place, the final blow arrived: an announcement confirming Frank Ocean wouldn't be performing due to "production delays beyond his control".
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Frank Ocean, famously, is not one to skimp on artistic vision at the expense of other people's time and energy. The same brain that produced "White Ferrari" is the same brain that made us wait four years for his second album, trolled the population of Bristol into thinking he was playing Lakota with James Blake and kicked off his comeback with a livestream of himself building a staircase. Who knows what "production delays" relates to – probably some video-based installation of abstract yet emotionally #impactful footage that wasn't properly rendered in time – but it's a hard pill to swallow when you know he could just stand on stage with a mic and say "what's up" and 40,000 people would die because it's the best thing they ever heard. Yes, Grace Jones, The xx and Slayer would all still be there, but it wouldn't be the same.Profoundly shook, I decided to approach the experience as though I had booked a holiday with someone and they'd binned me right before the flight, so I went on my own. You know the first Sex and the City film when Carrie goes on her honeymoon to Mexico with her mates instead of Big? Like that but if they spent their time getting rat arsed instead of mincing about in crap hats and without the deeply unfunny bit where Charlotte shits herself. Using Wikihow's Dealing With Emotional Pain page as a rough guide, I embarked upon an emotional pilgrimage to see if I could find happiness at Primavera without Frank Ocean.
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STEP 1: VALIDATION
STEP 2: CHANGE
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STEP 3: GRIEVING
STEP 4: MATES
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