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Music

Listen Back to Frank Ocean's Brilliant 'blonded' Radio Show in Full

The first episode of the Beats 1 show premiered suddenly and will soundtrack your pizza party.

With little warning, Frank Ocean debuted a new radio show on Beats 1 earlier today. blonded was every bit as good as you'd expect: Frank opened up with some Blonde cuts, played his early frontrunner for Song of the Summer, and then ran through a flawless playlist that included tracks from Dirty Projectors, Aphex Twin, Nina Simone, the Pixies, and Stevie Wonder. If the weather is even half-good where you are right now, Noisey suggests that you use this to soundtrack some sort of pizza party outside. You can listen back to the show in full below. It's billed as Episode 001, but nobody's certain about if and when it'll return.

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While the whole thing was unexpected, two interludes of Ocean interviewing Jay Z stood out. Brief though they may have been, they were insightful; Jay talked about the state of radio and the music industry:

"In this day and age, I just don't know. You take radio for instance, it's just pretty much an advertisement model. You take like these pop stations, they're reaching — however they  justify that — you know, young white female, so they're playing music based on those tastes. And then they're taking those numbers and they're going to advertising agencies and people are paying numbers based on the audience that they have. So these places are not even based on music. Their playlist isn't based on music. If you think, like a person like Bob Marley right now probably wouldn't play on a pop station, which is crazy. It's not even about the DJ discovering what music is best. Music is music. The line's just been separated so much that you know, we're lost at this point in time. They have to revolutionize that thing, like, be more progressive. And I think with all the technology and where we are today, there's definitely a more efficient way to get music out because as the whole idea behind having a festival that played all sorts of music, because no one listens to music like that. You just listen to music more than ever. Back in the days it used to be hip hop clubs, like specific hip hop clubs. Now every club is a hip hop club. Every club it's a music club, you go in there you liable to hear EDM, hip hop, you're gonna hear some soul, you're definitely gonna hear "Poison" around 2-3 in the morning."

Later, Jay talked on the relationship between music and technology, which isn't an easy thing to pick off in three minutes, but it is an extremely Jay Z thing to do:

"It's unfortunate, because with technology and everything moving forward, it should be a better way that the music, the musicians, the radio and these things that are supposed to be instrument for the arts should exist and it shouldn't be about advertisement. The more times someone like yourself can bypass that, it's better for the arts and it's better for the audience because you have to have like a level discipline and just a belief to put music out in this place, where not everyone can. People wanna shoot for that and then they're making music that's not really conditioned to who they are, so they can reach a certain platform."

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