The music industry has never been especially friendly to introverts like Frank Ocean. Open to any page in modern pop history, and you’ll find examples of what happens when reserved musical genius is shoved, by choice or by accident, into the spotlight that invariably comes with international fame. Some—like Ocean’s co-headliners at Los Angeles’ FYF this year, be it Björk, Missy Elliott, or Trent Reznor—have leaned into it anyway, finding an ironic catharsis from the preferred solitude of their daily lives through extravagant showmanship. But many others, from Brian Wilson to Kate Bush to Lauryn Hill, have come to blows with those expectations, often spending decades in bitter tugs-of-war with a business that suffers far fewer blows from artists than it inflicts upon them.

That Ocean would become a part of that latter group has been evident for some time now. But as he’s made clear since nostalgia, ultra. got the ball rolling on his career more than a half-decade ago, Frank Ocean has never been content to simply resist the traditional mandates of stardom, nor has he simply learned to cope with them through reckless self-medication. (One of the various doodles scrawled in permanent marker on the catwalk of his Saturday night set read NO DRUGS; the mom on “Be Yourself” would be proud.) Instead, Ocean has repeatedly insisted that those standards change to accommodate him: from rewriting the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing” (the latter invited him on tour), to giving Def Jam the all-but-inscrutable Endless to fulfill his contract before self-releasing the far more commercially viable Blonde 24 hours later, both the industry and Frank fans have had to repeatedly adapt their preconceived notions of the way musical greatness is crafted, disseminated, and sustained.

This tension was perfectly embodied on Saturday night, when—after years of canceled festival and tour dates—Ocean finally returned to the American stage at L.A.’s Exposition Park. The night prior, Björk and Missy Elliott had each lit up FYF’s main stage with stadium-style blowouts; the former employed a small orchestra, elaborate visuals, and fireworks, while the latter celebrated her own homecoming after a decade away with tightly choreographed dancers, a relentless hype-man, and a full-on video retrospective. When Ocean took the floor, however, he did so with a conspicuous lack of pomp, beginning with the eschewal of the existing stage altogether, in favor of a catwalk and conjoined platform placed roughly 100 feet into the crowd.

Set pieces provided a glimpse into where Ocean seems to feel most comfortable, arranged like an intimate recording studio, down to the music stands and legless mid-century Wurlitzer (on which he plunked the minimal chords of “Good Guy” twice, unsatisfied on first go-round). For 90 minutes, in rhinestoned Converse high-tops and a Nike shirt emblazoned with the words INSTANT KARMA, Ocean wandered the T-shaped stage of his own devising, with cameramen projecting their findings of the reclusive artiste as early ’90s camcorder footage on the stage’s three massive screens. Every so often, a camera would alight on the laptop screen of a visual artist nearby, who played video clips like the pink elephant scene from Dumbo and what appeared to be a snippet of Blade Runner. Even best new bud Brad Pitt was there to be filmed, pretending to have a phone conversation just offstage throughout Blonde’s tweak on the Carpenters’ “Close to You.”

Though the crowd in attendance numbered in the tens of thousands, Ocean approached his return performance less like a sold-out stadium show and more like an improvisational “MTV Unplugged” session that just happened to have attracted an outsized number of onlookers, squeezing together for a glimpse of the action. His vocals were as crisp and perfected as Björk’s well-oiled delivery had been the night before, but he sang as though laying tracks rather than putting on a live show—an effect augmented by the noise-canceling headphones he wore on top of in-ear monitors. That people were watching and cheering for him was almost beside the point; the few times he addressed the crowd, it was in a low, relaxed voice, as though speaking to a room of 20.