Frank Ocean Explains His “Slide” Lyrics
In this digital era where everyone easily makes themselves omnipresent, Frank Ocean can seem like quite the mysterious character. He doesn’t make appearances often and when he does emerge, he says very little before he seemingly disappears once again.
Several months after the release of his albums Endless and Blonde, Frank reemerged on a Calvin Harris single featuring Quavo and Offset of Migos. On the upbeat single “Slide,” Frank delivers lyrics that are easy to sing along to but not as simple to fully comprehend—a technique familiar to the songwriter. Thankfully, Frank didn’t leave us in the dark too long as he officially annotated his lyrics on Genius last night.
In his annotation, he explains the opening lyrics—”I might / Empty my bank account / And buy that boy with a pipe”—refers to “A Picasso painting that sold for so much money.” More specifically, Pablo Picasso’s 1905 painting Garçon à la pipe (which translates to “Boy with a pipe”) that was auctioned off for a record $104.2 million in 2004.
Listen to “Slide” and check out some other burning Frank Ocean mysterious we’d still like answers to below.
[youtube ytid=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEmLJpJBres&w=560&h=315%5D
