Frank Ocean is airborne, looking around, taking it all in. "Up above the birds, I saw the sky like I never seen before," he whispers on his major-label debut, Channel Orange, as avian chirps surround him. "You thought I was above you." The 24-year-old has quickly proven himself to be among the most gifted singer-songwriters of his generation; he's got the type of voice, wit, charm, smarts, and ineffable humanity that's always hoped for, but never promised. And he's got every reason to think he's above the vividly realized lost souls that slouch, preen, and weep throughout his album. But that's not how Frank Ocean works. His lofty gaze is powerful, but not all-powerful. "What's a god to a non-believer who don't believe in anything?" he sang on Watch the Throne's "No Church in the Wild". He's so good at questioning that answers can't help but bubble up in the wake of his words.

Along with Ocean's empathy for his characters is a sense of repose-- he's been there, he's weathered it, and he's come away with his Zen-like calm intact. On Channel Orange, this serene deadpan is splashed with crackling emotion, as though he's alternately narrating and starring in his own Magnolia-style cross-wired-heartbreak epic. It's all there on proper opener "Thinkin Bout You", where he battles his own brain while reminiscing about a first love. He tells himself white lies in the verse before flipping to a falsetto that could make D'Angelo sweat for the endless wound of a chorus: "Do you not think so far ahead?/ Cause I've been thinkin bout forever."

When Ocean dropped an early take of "Thinkin Bout You" on his Tumblr last summer, it was quickly followed by a version from perfectly competent Roc Nation signee Bridget Kelly, who claimed Ocean originally wrote the song for her. The fact that Ocean's take dwarfs Kelly's both artistically as well as in terms of popularity is telling. After languishing as a behind-the-scenes writer for pop stars including Brandy, John Legend, and Justin Bieber, with "Thinkin Bout You" Ocean doubled down on the out-of-nowhere success of his unique and brilliant 2011 mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra., marking his territory as a performer in his own right. And while he's now primarily writing songs for himself, his time toiling in L.A. studios gave him the experience to create a piece as accomplished and varied as Channel Orange, which swings from Stevie-style keyboard breeziness to 1990s bap&B to mystic psych rock to crunching 8-bit funk without thinking twice.

The "Thinkin Bout You" mix-up was telling for another reason, too. As written, it's by-and-large a unisex composition, and the line, "my eyes don't shed tears, but boy they pour when I'm thinkin bout you," didn't seem especially revealing since Ocean wrote the song for a woman. In light of the letter he published earlier this month, in which he stated that his first love, at age 19, was with a man, that line-- and others on the album-- gains some personal and historical context. For a culture that accurately prides itself on sonic progression, hip-hop and R&B can be woefully conservative when it comes to sexuality. This is changing, and Frank Ocean is helping it to change, and if his revelation inspires others to understand themselves or the world more fully, then that could be one of Channel Orange's finest legacies. But it will not be the album's only legacy.

Aside from its bravery, Ocean's letter was, in itself, stunningly written. Its beautiful ambiguities had people reacting with sensational headlines, and then amending those sensational headlines, and then thinking about how and why they personally reacted to such sensational headlines. More questions; more answers. After realizing he was in love with a man, Ocean "reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager. the ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak." And, whether consciously or not, Channel Orange's language is admirably-- and skillfully-- inclusive. Rather than getting listeners to comb through the lyrics for certain words or references, Ocean mixes things up so well-- and coats the entire affair with heavy doses of disorienting surreality-- that petty pronoun policing is rendered completely useless as deeper meanings reveal themselves at the same time.

While pop is currently in the golden age of exacting self-reflection-- an often beguiling phenomenon spurred on by the internet's infinite mirror-- Ocean is interested in a more selfless pursuit. "As a lifestyle, you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy," Ocean recently told The New York Times. "I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. Even though it's my voice, I'm a storyteller." Those tales are as wide-ranging as they are engrossing, always benefitting from Ocean's eye for detail and specificity. There are sly California class observations in the vein of Joan Didion or Randy Newman, where latchkey "Super Rich Kids" can't see past their own one-percent "Sweet Life". But once again, Ocean isn't just sniping easy targets; "why see the world when you got the beach?" he asks, a Rorschach test of a hook that leaves its levels of bliss or cynicism wholly up to the listener.

There are plenty of addicts on the back half of the album: the fiend at the center of "Crack Rock" whose family "stopped inviting you to things" and "won't let you hold their infant," or the poisoned relationship between a dealer and his mule on "Lost". On the record's most harrowing cut, "Bad Religion", Ocean is crippled by love and left searching for life's answers in the back of a cab-- the string-bleeding ballad finds the singer offering his most impassioned plea yet: "This unrequited love/ To me it's nothing but a one man cult and cyanide in my styrofoam cup/ I could never make him love me."

While Channel Orange is stuffed with one-of-a-kind details and characters, its overall scope is grand, as is Ocean's. Tape-hiss interludes bind these very hi-fi songs together with a musty analog quality, and a couple of tracks seem to end mid-sentence, leaving you no choice but to keep going. And there's a timeless philosophy involved here, one of hard-won acceptance and the acknowledgement that love and sex and loss will always draw legends to them. How else to explain "Pyramids", a 10-minute time warp that goes from ancient Egyptian wonders to modern strip clubs and essentially reincarnates one of the most storied female rulers in history as a six-inch-heeled woman of the night. But still, the song doesn't read as an indictment of the last 2,000 years as much as yet another attempt to cleverly level the playing field.

"holding my head. keeping it g [...] whatever 'keeping it g' means to me. i've sorta zoned in on my own definition." Frank wrote that on December 27, 2011-- the same day he wrote the "first love" letter he published last week. Both missives, along with Channel Orange itself, carry the same spirit of confident, open-minded redefinition; he's living in his own world, but also fascinated with what's around him. Currently, his Twitter bio reads: "i don't know anything. & neither do you." In Frank Ocean-speak, that's not a statement of ignorance but rather one of wisdom.