Hello! Welcome to a Someone Should… with a Music Week twist. A classic album tangled with a classic piece of hardware.
We all have a sound which reminds us of our gaming childhood. For me, it's the Artisans theme in Spyro The Dragon. For Frank Ocean, evidently, it's the Street Fighter 2 opening beep. It's this sound which opens his debut album Channel Orange, a narrative album about a conflicted adolescence whose only constant was video games. This beep follows the distinctive start up sound of the original PlayStation, before Ocean takes us on a journey of unrequited love, drug addiction, coming out, religion, Hurricane Katrina, and existential dread.
We might associate the PS1 with Final Fantasy 7, Tekken 3, and Crash Bandicoot, but the truth is we all associate the console with something deeper. The sounds, the look, and the feel of the machine reminds us of the time we were enthralled by the PS1. Channel Orange, bookended by the PS1 start up and the fuzz of a CRT TV switching off, wraps up Ocean's songs in the era and the memories of the PS1.
