Today marks ten years since the release of Blonde. Among the elements Frank Ocean cites as the cost of the recordings, included in the 2022 reissue, are “two Nike gym bags stuffed with unmarked cash, $360,000 in advances for King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano LLP (paid since then), 4 kilos of muscle, 720 nights at the Mercer Hotel, a liver filtering 492 liters of alcohol at the Plastic People bar, $13,000 in designer black clothing, 18 flights to Berlin for partying, and two devastating breakups (the third was not devastating).”
The artist made a point of clarifying at the time that this was “fiction,” but he stuck to reality by including in the cost list the album that Blonde forever eclipsed: “A 45-minute LP titled Endless made to the specifications of the recording contract.” The long-forgotten visual album by Ocean also reached its tenth anniversary yesterday, August 19, having been released a day before the main work we all know and love.
Despite the wonderful version of “At Your Best (You Are Love)” that opens the record with the strings of the very Jonny Greenwood, or the ephemeral immediacy of “Comme Des Garçons,” it’s clear that Endless is far more irregular than Blonde and, indeed, its raison d’être is the exit from a recording contract. Even so, among its 19 tracks lies a mystery worthy of its creator: did Frank Ocean sample “Toxicosmos” by Los Planetas or not?
There are internet forums where this has been argued since 2017, treating it as an unverified certainty: “frank ocean (I can’t stand him) has a sampler of Los Planetas,” wrote user “robreto” at the time. This reached me many years later, when I was listening to Endless for the first time and I could not believe my ears around 1:25 of “Hublots” as, among various sound effects, the opening arpeggio of “Toxicosmos” begins to emerge. In Los Planetas’ track, the coincidence starts around 13 seconds. It’s very, very brief, but there is no doubt, at least by ear.
How is this possible? Is Frank Ocean a fan of Los Planetas? Did he stumble upon the record somewhere? Did Los Planetas and Frank Ocean share a studio without knowing it? We know that “Una semana en el motor de un autobús” was recorded at Zabriskie Point Studios in New York together with producer Kurt Ralske, while “Hublots” was made at the Mercer Hotel in the same city 18 years later, according to the official Endless credits. So, it’s practically impossible to know how Ocean arrived at “Toxicosmos.” And what if it isn’t a sample?
Although the audio sounds exceptionally similar and Genius does lend it legitimacy as a sample, official evidence points to it not being one. To begin with, there isn’t any member of Los Planetas listed in the published credits for “Hublots.” The only names that appear are Frank Ocean and the producer 88-Keys, in addition to Garth Porter, Anthony Mitchell and Daryl Braithwaite. Curiously, these three last individuals are members of The Sherbs, an Australian band that does appear sampled and credited on the track.
“We Ride Tonight” is the track Ocean reused, also notably reworked in Daft Punk’s “Contact.” In other words, there is indeed a sample in “Hublots,” just not the one we’re interested in. The Sherbs also appear in the song’s data in ASCAP, the US SGAE, but there is no trace of anything related to Los Planetas. Here arises the final question: what if it is an uncredited sample?
The only way to test this theory is to compare the waveforms of both recordings. This might be going a bit far, but it is the tenth anniversary of Blonde and Endless. The occasion deserves it. To determine whether Los Planetas have an uncredited sample in Frank Ocean’s “Hublots,” it was necessary to turn to technology that is doing so much harm to the music industry. AI had to be good for something.
The first thing I did was locate the time frames in which “Toxicosmos” and “Hublots” coincide. For Los Planetas’ track, focusing on the initial seconds doesn’t help, since the pitch change that supposedly appears in Ocean’s track doesn’t arrive until around 18 seconds. After that, AI helped me verify how similar the waveforms of the two tracks are.
That is, basically, the fingerprint a song leaves. If we place both tracks over one another, the peaks and valleys they contain should line up very clearly. And so they do. According to ChatGPT, the match is nearly 90%.
Let us go further: if we align both tracks, adjust the volume, and erase everything that coincides between them, we find that a large portion of the sound cancels out. If Frank had merely played the same notes by chance, without knowing about the Granada crowd, we would not expect such a high degree of coincidence.
The final thing that could dispel the uncredited-sample hypothesis is that both Ocean and Los Planetas might have sampled the same recording, but that would not fit at all with a rock band like this. The evidence is strong, but this mystery seems destined to remain a huge curiosity.
Nor do we know whether Los Planetas are aware of this. If Frank took his time crediting the The Sherbs sample, also used in a minimal way in the song, why wouldn’t he have done the same with “Toxicosmos”? And what if the author of Blonde did indeed contact Los Planetas? And what if they told him they didn’t want credits? Like Blonde and Endless, this now belongs to legend.
