Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

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.

haha feeling that post rt now xp

I would like to criticise Frank Ocean, but honesty compels me to admit that my own coming out was also a carefully stage-managed media event. In truth the timing was fairly cynical, in that I wanted it to coincide with starting to talk openly about being gay and being in gay relationships.

Plus as I had gotten to university I rather self-servingly concluded that on balance the improvements in my social life would outweigh the negative reactions.

So I better leave it to others with more clean hands to take up the crusade against this.

schlump otm

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.

― now all my posts got ship in it (dayo), Thursday, July 5, 2012 6:47 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah and it's super funny because the Clooney remake dropped when he was like 14 so you know he was all trying to be slick referencing the o.g.

anyway the best parody stage name i could come up with was Marlon Kowalski

I guess straight people take for granted that coming out or admitting to a powerful attraction ISN'T marketeing or Creating a Narrative.

lol tim

I guess straight people take for granted that coming out or admitting to a powerful attraction ISN'T marketeing or Creating a Narrative.

i meant that schlump's right about the consequences being unknown (and unknowable) at this point. like, in doing this, frank ocean isn't following the accepted steps of a familiar career-advancement scheme.

i mean sure, self-presentation is a kind of marketing. we're always creating a narrative. that's as true of straight people as anyone else. but a lot of people (a lot of straight people, not to put too fine a point on it) will cynically dismiss frank's action here as "mere marketing", and i reject that.

^ yeah I would agree with this. i think being able to read his choice as marketing or self-definition is really interesting, speaks to something true about how we project our selves, but all the accusations of it as such have been loaded with the idea that it's a detached, sensible move, or a commercial strategy, which i don't buy. it's more that for someone to roll their eyes & say, oh huh this old gambit doesn't really seem to intersect with what the guy's options are, cf goole's post, & in terms of reacting with the guy's work, the catalyst for anything being said or needing made sense of. i really liked some of the small clarifications people were making in the ta-nehisi piece about the nuances of how he might or might not define himself, & all of those considerations react interestingly w/what frank wrote, & what he wrote on his new record, & what he wrote on his last. i just think wherever he's up to in terms of talking about himself and his past is more rooted in those things - referencing parts of his past, singing about lovers unconcerned with the genre expectations covering personal pronouns - than it is anything else. it's creating a narrative yeah, like everything is, but that's part of the guy's artistry rather than his marketing, to me.

lol I just learned right now that Johnny Mathis is out. Of course, this probably says more about how little I pay attention to Johnny Mathis than it does anything else.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, July 4, 2012 1:18 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Here's the thing about Mathis, though. When he "came out" in People magazine in '82, it was in the most measured terms: "Homosexuality is a lifestyle that I have grown accustomed to." He then forced the magazine to immediately issue a retraction -- I guess he thought his comments were off the record? If he is gay, he seems to be v. conflicted about it -- or, at least, conflicted about being out. He's never, for instance, had a long-term relationship of any sort that anyone knows about. (That said, he also apparently gave interviews to The Advocate in the '70s when few ostensibly straight celebrities were doing so, and he's donated money to gay causes.)

He said more recently that he forced them to retract it because he got death threats and freaked out about it. He went back on the record as being gay in 2006.

not to judge him because that's a terrible situation to be in, especially back then, but i wonder if any homophobe has ever been satisfied or placated by a retraction of a coming-out announcement.

Some of them are. I mean. The Christian right's whole deal is that you can change and marry opposite-sex partners etc. etc. etc.

The main goal is to keep everyone fully closeted and 'being straight' but the secondary goal is to at the very least keep all of us rowdy and sinful queers out of the public eye because WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

the children find this lifestyle v alluring

they are particularly vulnerable during the cootie years

Ebony article covers everything we've already covered here, but I guess the "thinkpieces" are starting to materialize: http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/why-frank-oceans-coming-out-is-more-significant-than-anderson-coopers