The spoils of the hip-hop age came to a head around 2010, and then the singers started putting the golden cage of hip-hop success into songs. The Weeknd and Frank Ocean both brought the numbness of success into focus. That said, Channel orange sounds unrelentingly warm and even, sequenced into a narrative arc, and Ocean’s voice is relaxed, combining powerful highs with a hazy mid-range.  In “Bad Religion,” Ocean takes a ride with a cabdriver, and asks him to keep the meter running while he sings about religion. “If it brings me to my knees, it’s a bad religion,” he says. It’s a virtuosic song—as he sings about having “three lives balanced on my head like steak knives,” the music is a daredevil series of figures that cover a large territory and rarely overlap: marching-band snare drums, a string section, handclaps, and every station of Ocean’s voice, from a strangled falsetto to a clear, metallic cry. There’s also a ten-minute song about watching your girlfriend get dressed to go to work at a strip club called Pyramids. It flies by. Ocean is deciding what it means to talk about friendship, drugs, love, and sex, and is setting the parameters for shame and regret in a world in which failure is simply a way of saying hello.