Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

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

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.

Oh word? I had no idea.

Whenever I hear the whole "if the children see gay people being all gay and everything they will want to be gay themselves" argument, it only makes me wonder how fragile the person making the argument's own sexuality must be. Like, is your God-bestowed heterosexual attraction really that flimsy that the whole house of cards could be sent crumbling down cause of an episode of Glee or whatever?

“We probably haven’t seen a Black male artist do this since Sylvester,” Gipson added, referring to the iconic and late openly gay disco legend that died of AIDS-related complications in 1988.

xp

Whenever I hear the whole "if the children see gay people being all gay and everything they will want to be gay themselves" argument, it only makes me wonder how fragile the person making the argument's own sexuality must be. Like, is your God-bestowed heterosexual attraction really that flimsy that the whole house of cards could be sent crumbling down cause of an episode of Glee or whatever?

Usually, yes. Cf. http://gayhomophobe.com/

xp RuPaul?

out to begin with?

Sen. Roberto Arango on grindr. Claimed he was "documenting his weight loss."

http://www.mizozo.com/images/item_images/28000/27595_gallery.jpg

i felt i should document my weight loss on this Free Gay iPhone App

did Sen. Robert Arango release an R&B album I'm not aware of and that's why his name came up here? I'm just confused about this turn in the conversation

"Robert Arango" is a Frank Ocean nom de spume

i humbly request that we don't turn this thread into a compendium of now-out homophobes

Fair nuff. Sorry guys.

a cumpendium

anyway, it is sort of crazy that we can't come up with a comparable instance

when did "nom de spume" become a thing

questions better not asked

anyway, it is sort of crazy that we can't come up with a comparable instance

Tonex
Kele Okereke

kele is probably the most analogous example

Yeah, dude doesn't really have much of a foothold in the r&b/hip-hop scene, though.

i humbly request that we don't turn this thread into a compendium of now-out homophobes

is it okay to start a thread about Robert Arango's lost R&B album

Yeah, dude doesn't really have much of a foothold in the r&b/hip-hop scene, though.

― Johnny Fever, Friday, July 6, 2012 2:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

no, but other than that

I thought we were just talking about black male musicians in general. Ocean's story of his first love kind of reminded me of Bloc Party's "I Still Remember," in fact.

Yeah. Kele did do that dance album but he's always primarily been part of the indie scene and I don't know how large a profile he really has in North America - Britishers, etc.

well obv he had no profile in rap/r&b but there are still a lot of similarities there. not that it really matters.

Tonex
Kele Okereke

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Friday, July 6, 2012 11:06 AM (3 minutes ago)

thanks, jaymc.