Channel Orange
by Frank Ocean
Def Jam Records
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Frank Ocean hit the 55th Grammy Awards like a tsunami. Nominated for six awards, Ocean took home two—for Best Urban Contemporary and for Rap Collaboration—and performed a down-tempo love song to a guy named Forrest Gump. Best described by the Los Angeles Times as a “tortured ode to Ocean’s unrequited love for another man” with a “boundary-busting truth” at its core, “Forrest Gump” is as smooth as it is subversive. It’s also an obvious allusion to the movie with Tom Hanks in which the title character can’t stop running. “You run my mind boy,” Ocean croons, “You’re so buff and so strong.” But it’s Ocean who is strong, even fearless, given the fact that no contemporary hip-hop artist until now has stood on the Grammy stage and sang so openly about a same-sex attraction.
By Grammy night, Ocean had already been riding a long wave of success.
Very few music critics had failed to include his Channel Orange among the best albums of 2012. Rolling Stone called it “most exciting R&B breakthrough in recent memory” while the New York Times marveled that Ocean’s songs “create hollow spaces that they can only sometimes fill … [songs that]melt down and recast themselves, again and again.” Such malleability is just as evident in Ocean’s sexuality, which seemingly flows toward both sexes. Songs such as “Pyramids” and “Lost” are addressed to women, and big-breasted women at that, but what makes Channel Orange a work of romantic tragedy depends mainly on those same-sex odes. On “Thinkin Bout You,” a Grammy nominee for Best Record, Ocean laments that he loves a man who cannot, or will not, love him in return. “My eyes don’t shed tears but boy they pour when I’m thinkin bout you.” As a vocalist, Ocean sings in the soulful style of Marvin Gaye as he alternates effortlessly between the spoken word and an aching falsetto.
In addition, there’s “Bad Religion,” which opens with a church organ reminiscent of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” and Ocean asking if his cab driver will be his shrink for the hour: “I can’t tell you the truth about my disguise/ Unrequited love … I could never make him love me.” All of these songs stem from a real-life romance that the 25-year-old has made no attempt to hide. On July fourth of last year, Ocean took to his Tumblr account to describe the summer when he fell in love, at age nineteen, with his “straight” friend. “We spent that summer, and the summer after, together,” the confession reads in part, “I’d hear his conversation and his silence until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him.” Three years would pass before Ocean finally admitted to his feelings and found himself crushed by his friend’s unresponsiveness. Ocean—born Christopher Francis Breaux and brought up in Louisiana and California—wrote his cri de coeur on a flight from New Orleans to L.A. in 2011, but only released it as rumors began to circulate about the gay themes on his debut album. That he finally came out on Independence Day is hardly insignificant, since he concluded the post with: “I feel like a free man.” Def Jam’s Russell Simmons was quick to celebrate Ocean’s honesty, along with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, the latter writing on her website: “Be in love, be happy, be an inspiration.”
Interestingly, Ocean’s songs about women include some of his less inspired work, a feeling of numbness pervades them all. On “Novacane” (Ocean’s spelling), he uses a disoriented persona who “can’t feel a thing” to ask “Girl, I can’t feel my face/ What are we smokin’ anyway?” Another admission—that he “can’t feel nothin’, superhuman/ Even when I’m fuckin’ Viagra poppin”—suggests that he needs chemical help when it’s with a woman. “How you feeling girl/ How’s the gutter doing?” he asks of a girl addicted to crack cocaine in the bombastic “Crack Rock.”
But Ocean is more in keeping with J. Alfred Prufrock, the T. S. Eliot character famous for his sexual aloofness and estrangement from the opposite sex. In this way, Ocean is like a patient etherized upon a table. Still, it will be exciting to see what happens next, for Ocean the musician and the man, when he falls in love again and the boy loves him back.
Colin Carman PhD, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a Mayers fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.
