Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

i think you guys are willfully misreading the tone of the phrase "the feelgood LET LOVE RINNGG blah blah homo camp"

I invite FOXmarc to visit the gay thread anytime to watch how jolly this Lenny Kravitz homo camp can be in action.

i think you guys are willfully misreading the tone of the phrase "the feelgood LET LOVE RINNGG blah blah homo camp"

― some dude, Thursday, July 5, 2012 4:44 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

in what way?

also the phrase "marketing tactic"

now you're REALLY misreading my sarcastic tone, but not willfully (xpost)

A cicerone shouldn't overstep his (putatively) potable ambit, I guess. That's what I take from the indignant diorama Frank's orientation-teratism has metastatized from his extended mishpocha, from Speech to Lil B the now-debased. Prejudice sucks. Sure, all moral panics are eventually fungible, and uxorious gazumping has a dollar value when cathected out to the masses. Shit sells. But if there's one thing I learned as a glossolalic music critic back when Pitchfork was still a chimerical cryptopolis (before the pre-ordained ourobotic death spiral towards the idiolectic, go figure) it's that it's always better to play out your dangerous moves as a duodectet if you want to avoid the gravemen of the mythosphere. And that applies whether identity politics bibelots are set firmly aside or brought along for the ride, comprende? Fuck that shit, Frank. Deep in the pyramid they're playing your song.

thank you based luriqua

(putatively) potable

Frank Ocean is a great name, it's like he's the son of Billy Ocean.

I think Grampsy has an acute case of thesaurus poisoning

dafuq

i'll take putative potables for $200

lol

he should change it to frankly oceanic

And please, tone down the "jive talk", would you? I swear, ever since Hipster Runoff started up you young 'uns have been making less sense than a cat in a daisy suit. Try to use only words that appear in Webster's Dictionary and Farmer's Almanac.

― Grampsy, Wednesday, July 4, 2012 4:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol am0n

great post grampsy

lol "FOXmarc"

p sure the objectionably cynical part of that post was "making it a point to (sort of?) come out and associate yourself" rather than whatever the second bit was meant to be

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a0/Foghorn_Leghorn.png/175px-Foghorn_Leghorn.png

"In a daisy suit, that is."

yeah, the blossom of cynicism that popped up right after my post was exactly what i was talking about
it's just odd to me that there's a wave of people who can only process this kinda statement as "well CLEARLY this is about sales for his new album and brand positioning" as opposed to presuming that the lion's share of dude's message was that he doesn't feel a need to hide his personal tastes

a bit from column a and column b, omitting the word "clearly"

i guess I'm not buying it? I think he's gonna have to deal with being "the gay r&b singer" for the next ten years now; don't see how that's really going to help his career in the long or the short run... especially when dude has made such a big deal about not wanting to be pigeonholed

well he didn't want to be pigeonholed as R&B.

What I can tell you, forks? People are complicated. I don't see why ambition and spiritual ease couldn't both have motivated him.

I had deleted a post because some dude said pretty much the exact same thing in fewer words but the marketing angle here seems to be much more "this story is germane to some of the subject matter on this album" and is tied directly to the desire to be more forthcoming about who he is attracted to; releasing it early is tied to the idea of taking control of a growing narrative but seems to me to be a secondary concern.

i suppose both played some part, but given the genuine courage something like this would've taken I would prefer to err on the side of being more naive than more jaded

I don't think the jaded viewpoint requires any less courage! The blowback is going to be the blowback regardless.

I didn't come out at 24 over tumblr to potentially millions of people after writing songs for Beyonce, so I can only speculate.

so play out the jaded perspective: he's coming out at least partially to help provide a narrative for his album and to carve out a specific market niche?

I really hope no one does anything "to help provide a narrative."

and now I'm going to happy hour to advance the narrative that I like to drink after work. Ta!

"taking a growing control of a growing narrative" re your own sexuality is part and parcel of being a non-straight person. i don't think it was a secondary concern. i think it is the concern.

you don't need a 'reason' to tell the truth. it was strategic (in a justifiable, self-preserving way) for him to not be forthcoming with this information earlier in his career. but there doesn't need to be an explanation or agenda to him sharing facts about himself with the public.

xpost

he wrote a series of songs from a particular perspective, wrote liner notes to provide context behind that perspective, then released them early to take control of a growing external narrative that wasn't specifically what was being presented with the album

this cynical read of his actions doesn't make people slinging slurs at him or proclaiming that they can't bring themselves to listen to his music now any less damaging or hurtful

xp: J0rd, what I meant by that is that the liner notes were not created so they could be released on Tumblr before the album was released.

jordan otm imo

grampsy - straight fire beautiful post

then released them early to take control of a growing external narrative that wasn't specifically what was being presented with the album

i think "what was being presented with the album" is actually "what was being presented as his life" & for that reason i have trouble reading anything cynical into the way in which he decided to wrangle the "narrative"

i do think it's cool that he tried to unveil this at the exact same time as his music that addresses it, and pretty much would've if some of the handful of people that heard the album a couple weeks ahead of everyone else hadn't ran to their blogs to speculate

Can I just clarify that I'm not actually arguing that he did this for wholesale cynical reasons, just that I don't think the attributing this to cynical reasons makes it any less understandable or brave an act?

People bring up marketing like it's the epitome of disingenuousness even in cases where it's about shining a spotlight on the what "the big takeaway" should be; in this case, I think the big takeaway is that Frank Ocean is a candid motherfucker doing something that no one else in his genre is really doing on the stage where he is operating, and that's very laudable regardless of "the motivation" that got him there.

i wouldn't argue any of that
i just don't think that whatever elements of marketing that are part of this are smart marketing of the positives here; they dropped the news via a tumblr on a holiday

I'll never forgive my mother for sending me to "feelgood LET LOVE RINNGG blah blah homo camp"

well the "blah blah" part stuck, at least

blah blah stuck how does that even?

as someone who never had go through something like hiding one's sexual identity and then come out about it, i'm certainly not going to monday morning quarterback how or why someone else's decision was made.

i'm privvy to this One Big Coming Out Train of Thought but not permitted to divulge the collective's singular viewpoint to outsiders.

your initial post insinuated that it his decision to "come out" was (partly?) driven by marketing

i don't think he was driven by it but if you're going to include something obviously "controversial"/"buzzworthy"/w/e in the liner notes (or release early over social media) that's going to draw people it's still marketing without having to be a big bad thing people need to defend against.

"taking a growing control of a growing narrative" re your own sexuality is part and parcel of being a non-straight person. i don't think it was a secondary concern. i think it is the concern.

i would love to think this was the motivation

xpost <3

more surprising than frank ocean being bi is that anyone still has liners

this is why it's so exhausting just being in the same universe as marketing

essay was gorge, explained why i like his lyrics (because he is a good writer) (this is not always why i like lyrics)

Frank Ocean is a great name, it's like he's the son of Billy Ocean.

― EDB, Thursday, July 5, 2012 4:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah to me it's pretty clear this dude saw ocean's eleven when he was 16 and thought it would be a good stage name. I mean we were all inventing band names for ourselves when we were 16.

thread took a depressing turn

this is why it's so exhausting just being in the same universe as marketing

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Thursday, July 5, 2012 6:42 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

real talk

i read this yesterday & it feels relevant: experimental philosophy. the weird thing about diagnosing the tumblr post as being some shrewd, calculating marketing move is that it's the kind of thing you usually do once someone's done something that turns out successfully, as evidence to their shrewdness; everyone said tablets couldn't work BUT HE INVENTED ONE. & everyone's doing so before the guy's "decision" has even been vindicated. the parody twitter feed above RTs so much just awful, hateful thought from probably pretty regular kids & members of his audience; he told a truth about himself & opened himself up to that. there's so little precedent for this - like most of this thread is people scrabbling around for a memorable out celebrity, of which jesus lord there are just none, huh - that to attribute any degree of shrewd commercial calculation to his thought process is crazy, assumes calculations can be made when there aren't any existing numbers to add up. like goole says:

what's the endpoint of that argument? he really should have stayed closeted, you know, true to the music, no gimmicks...

― goole, Thursday, 5 July 2012 21:28 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a thing that he didn't invent but felt compelled for whatever reason to share. picking apart the potential upsides makes you one of those pedants who insist there are no selfless act. HE RAN INTO THE BUILDING TO SAVE THE BURNING CHILD BUT HE KNEW HE WOULD BE FONDLY THOUGHT OF AROUND THE TOWN. maybe he gets some upsides! maybe, but any kind of measured assessment of 'how is this gonna play commercially' would have made it a stupid thing to do - either for pigeonholing him creatively as the gay rnb star, per forks' post, or for adding an element to his image that alienates some fans in his field. everything you do when you have more than five people watching you is gonna elicit some positive and some negative responses; read the guy's post, it wasn't about them, it was about him.