What does an artist 'owe' their fans?

From Lauryn Hill to Frank Ocean

Watching Elvis in February I was struck by a line at the end of the film, when Elvis (played by Austin Butler, who really should have won the Best Actor Oscar) is being suffocated by his own success. 

His relationship with his wife has broken down, he has become addicted to prescription drugs and the only time he feels happy is on stage – where he has become dependent on the applause. He is itching for freedom from his controlling, Machiavellian manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) and is desperate to leave America and tour the world. But, his star is dwindling, he is broke and in debt, and when Parker books him a lucrative residency at Vegas’s International Hotel, it’s an offer he can’t refuse. 

On stage one night, after realising the reason why Parker won’t let him travel is because Parker has lied about his identity and doesn’t have a passport, Elvis thanks Parker for his service and tells the audience, with a bitter laugh: “He has locked me in this golden cage… to keep me here forever with you, ladies and gentlemen!”. Without realising the misery in his words, the audience jubilantly applauds him.

At the end of the film, Colonel Parker addresses the viewer and asks fans to consider their complicity in the tragedy of Elvis: “I didn't kill him. It was love. His love for you.”

The power dynamics around artists have always fascinated me. Of course we know how exploited many artists are by the industry, controlled by their entourages with hundreds on their payroll, in debt to their labels, working in the interests of everyone but themselves. There have been terrible stories from Amy Winehouse to Avicii. 

But what about the fans – the ones who ultimately pay an artist’s wages? ‘Stans’ will often talk about the artists they worship in quasi-religious terms. They are prepared to back them no matter what; the energy and money spent on supporting them will often far eclipse the devotion to their own family. Their love appears unconditional. In return, the artist will give them what they want: music, performances, merch, interviews, videos, photographs, meet and greets, access to their intimate worlds. They give them everything because, as Elvis knew, he was nothing without his fans.

So what happens when an artist refuses to play ball? 

Last Sunday night, Frank Ocean performed for the first time in almost six years at Coachella, having gone almost totally off grid since he released his last album Blonde, with no indication that he was ever going to release music again. And so fans who had nearly given up hope of seeing him on stage ever again spent a small fortune on tickets, or woke up early to watch by live stream at six am on Monday – as my boyfriend did, having spoken of little else for weeks. I can’t think of a more anticipated concert in my lifetime.

But the set left fans furious. Ocean arrived an hour late, and refused to be recorded for Coachella’s official live stream, with fans resorting to watching through concert goers’ fuzzy TikTok lives. Those at Coachella didn’t feel their in-person experience was much better, with many commenting on the staging obscuring Ocean from view, with the giant video screens displaying unclear images, while Ocean spent most of the performance sitting down, getting up just a few times to walk across the stage, singing without his microphone. He changed up some of the lyrics to his songs and included remixes, which some perceived as purposefully making it trickier for fans to sing along. And, cutting the set short because of the Coachella curfew, Ocean left the stage abruptly. 

“The entire thing felt forced, unprepared, and just sad. Possibly the worst headliner, ever? Shocking, tbh,” posted insider festival account Festive Owl on Twitter. “I had wishful thinking about Frank all these years but now… I just think he’s an entitled POS with a god complex,” posted one fan. “Frank Ocean leaving the desert after collecting his check from his bare minimum @coachella set,” another person tweeted, with a GIF of the fictional Joanne the scammer. Fans who held out hope of his second headline slot at Coachella’s second weekend were mocked by others for having Stockholm Syndrome, because, as one person wrote on Twitter, “Frank Ocean has always hated his fans”.

But what does Ocean ‘owe’ the people who have bought his music and made him a star? On the one hand, he entered a (highly lucrative) contract with Coachella of his own volition, and to put on what some might call a half-arsed performance for people who have paid hundreds to be there is disrespectful and unprofessional. 

Festive Owl reported that his original staging – an ice rink with skaters – was pulled by Ocean at the last minute, leaving skaters who had practised for weeks devastated and Coachella officials “with a very sour taste in their mouths”. Other reports claim however that Ocean had hurt his ankle and the staging was changed by recommendation from his doctor.

I personally don’t think that artists are allowed a free pass from the social and moral obligations we all live by simply because they’re “special”, and it seems that perhaps Ocean could have communicated better with either his collaborators or his audience. Yet, while his audience interaction was indeed limited, the short speech he did make was generously personal, revealing that he was performing at Coachella because his younger brother – who died in a car crash in 2020 aged 18 – loved the festival, and they had danced there together during happier times. His performance was, in part, motivated by grief.

So did disappointed fans want more entertainment? In which case they should have known better. Ocean is not an ‘entertainer’. Perhaps because he is shy, or simply because he doesn’t see his music as ‘spectacle’, his concerts have always frustrated viewers who long for artist-fan interaction or the theatrics of other artists – you feel like you’re intruding on a studio session, he won’t pander to his audience. That’s if he ever turns up at all, with a long history of cancelling shows.

As this blog predicted in 2020, Ocean headlining Coachella was a risky idea to start with. “Ocean treats the stadium like a small jazz club with 20 people in attendance… He purposefully sings altered versions of his songs, using different inflections in his voice and slightly altered melodies and timing so the crowd can’t sing along…Most artists would create a loud, energetic set that caters to the audience. Frank seems like he’s fucking with them.” 

Though perhaps Ocean sees singalongs like Bob Dylan does: “My songs are personal music, they’re not communal. I wouldn’t want people singing along with me,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 2012. “It would sound funny. I’m not playing campfire meetings. I don’t remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.”

So Frank Ocean’s set, perhaps, was authentic to him, which is why some notable fans such as Justin Bieber said it was brilliant. A GQ reviewer, writing that the performance was “great”, said Ocean had been “misunderstood”, and that he seemed excited “to show us what he’s been into lately, mixing several of his most-loved tracks into new arrangements none of us had ever heard before”. 

 A “true artist” as his devotees love to describe him, Ocean is not in it for the fame, the adulation, or even, one might infer from his refusal to tour, the money. He couldn’t be more different to Elvis. Despite transcending his cult status to become one of the world’s most popular artists, he has lost none of the credibility that OG music fans often mourn once their artists hit the big-time. His cult following has remained intact. The mystery that surrounds him is his entire appeal, it’s why his merch continues to sell out six years after releasing his last album, Blonde, and why a Channel Orange vinyl has become one of the rarest collectibles. So on the one hand fans want him to remain an enigma, unblemished by fame, a “pure artist”, and on the other hand they want him to headline the world’s most commercial festival. So what do they really want?

A similar dichotomy exists here in the UK with J Hus, perhaps equal to Frank Ocean in his unique position in the music industry: mysterious and rebellious enough to retain his original following, all the while hitting a national fame he seems uninterested in courting. He’s never been accused of “selling out”, and yet one of my middle-class friend’s 60-year-old mother is quite literally one of his biggest fans.

Like Ocean, he won’t play by the rules of the game: he remains independent, went to no1 for his last album Big Conspiracy without doing any press, didn’t even pick up his Brit award in 2021, keeps out of the public eye and still hasn’t released the album listeners thought was coming early 2022 (now allegedly coming this summer). But would he carry the same ice-cold cache were he not so slippery, if he followed the same album cycles as everybody else, if he did the press, the marketing, the social media? I doubt it. Fans love to hate him for how little he gives them, but I think deep down they wouldn’t want it any other way. 

And yet I can imagine this kind of pressure on an artist to keep feeding the beast can be intense – no creative can be rushed into producing excellent work – and as Ocean told The New York Times in one of the few interviews he has ever done: “I know that once it’s out, it’s out forever, so I’m not really tripping on how long it’s taking.”

Fan entitlement can also become toxic. When Ocean didn’t release an album in 2015 like he had promised, they were outraged, with one ID piece describing one fan using homophobia to vent their frustration. In the New York Times interview, Ocean reveals how fans “stopped me on the street when I hadn’t put music out in a while, literally would yell out of an Uber, ‘Frank, where the album?’”

In a Medium essay titled In Defense of Lauryn Hill, rapper Talib Kweli writes about how many fans turned their back on Hill, who never released another studio album after her ground-breaking 1998 debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She stopped giving the “the hits” at shows, to which she often turned up up to 90 minutes late, shied from the public eye and eventually seemed to retire from music altogether to focus on her family. She was the subject of various takedowns by writers demanding what she was doing with her life, and was often heckled by fans demanding another album at her own shows, which, in 2014 a reviewer described as, “so obscure the reinterpretations that people in the crowd were playing ‘guess the song”. 

But, Hill doesn’t believe she owes her fans anything. “If I make music now, it will only be to provide information for my own children. If other people benefit from it, so be it,” she has said. Kweli agrees, writing:  “D’Angelo and Sade have made us wait decades for music. Dr. Dre’s Detox may never be released. I don’t know the exact reasons why, nor do I care. Dr. Dre gave me N.W.A, The Chronic, and 2001. He owes me more? Nah…I am not obligated to make the same album over and over again just because fans demand it. I am allowed to try new things, succeed at them or fail at them. I am allowed to not make music anymore ever, if that’s what I choose to do. I am allowed to give a shitty show or not even show up if I feel like it.”

His last point is controversial. I think most people would agree that if you are asking someone for money to come and see you perform, a certain level of professionalism is required, be that from sound quality to punctuality. But when it comes to the actual performance, as Ocean’s Coachella set proved, somebody’s ‘shitty’ can be another person’s beautiful. Kweli himself describes going to an intimate Hill concert with no expectations of what she should perform, and – despite her remixing many of her songs – thinking it was brilliant. 

Overnight, it was announced that, predictably, Ocean had pulled out of this weekend’s second Coachella set. I don’t blame him. Who would want to walk on stage with that amount of pressure on their back, having been torn apart for his first show in six years, that he might have genuinely thought was good?

Like Elvis, Ocean knows what it's like to be trapped in a golden cage. In 2009, he signed a two-album deal with Def Jam, and following the release of his debut Channel Orange, became one of the label’s most valuable artists. But he wanted out. And, in 2016, he pulled off a stunt that rocked the music business: he released the album Endless on Def Jam, before releasing Blonde – the album he intended to release all along – on his own label. He was free.

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