Writing about Frank Ocean in a recent New Yorker piece, Sasha "Why Isn't Indie Rock Blacker?" Frere-Jones, listing off Ocean's musical forebears, mentions Prince's first seven albums. He doesn't expound on this, so I'm left wondering if he really meant the first seven. From For You to Around the World in a Day. Really? That's his cutoff? I've griped before about how music critics will automatically bring up Prince any time a black musician working in a mainstream genre releases something that doesn't fit into current commercial trends, but this is irritatingly arbitrary. I wonder if he meant what's generally considered Prince's classic run—from Dirty Mind to Sign "O" the Times, which constitutes seven albums—but I've probably wasted more time than necessary thinking about this.
