From Spotify Studios, this is Dissect.

Long-For musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes.

I'm your host Cole Kushna. Today we continue our serialized examination of Channel Orange by Frank Ocean.

In our last two episodes, we tackled the album's 10 minute centerpiece pyramids, a tragic

story of a woman named Cleopatra that spans two different historical time periods expressed in two different but closely related musical environments.

Channel Orange continues with the songs Lost, White, and Monks.

Three tracks will cover in broad strokes before landing on the main subject of today's episode,

the heart-wrenching ballad Bad Religion. The song Lost in its upbeat glittering musical texture

is a much needed reprieve from the more somber tracks

crack rock and pyramids that precede it. But despite its external sparkle, the story told

on loss is itself a tragic tale. Like pyramids, the song's subject is a woman with the story itself

told from the perspective of a man. Specifically, the man is a drug dealer who uses his girlfriend

as a drug meal. He has her flying all over the world smuggling

cocaine that she straps to her body. The man seems to genuinely care for this

woman, but as expressed in the song's hook, both are caught up or lost in

the excitement of their prosperous illegal lifestyle. of it all. Gare you know you're lost

lost in a thrill of it all.

Miami and still there are Tokyo's brain loss.

Los Angeles, India lost no train-dons.

The narrator has dreams of the two living a normal life,

but by the song's bridge, the woman is actually cooking the dope herself, displaying just how deep the two have become in their drug centered life though. Can't believe I got her out here cooking dough.

Cooking dough.

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