Like the shaded ‘Thinking of You’, with its muted modulations and poised use of keys, it’s r’n’b with the volume turned town. Unforced and wispy, the production on the former provides the perfect backdrop for Ocean’s ambivalent and coyly confided depiction of emotional dependency between addicts, where friendship and sexual love becomes confused in the support-and-succumb cycle. A largely beatific album, it propagates love over high living, but also shipped is the urban locale, the one-dimensional serenading and the cartoonish sexuality that informs a significant percentage of mainstream r’n’b, substituted for the same precocious wisdom, emotional intelligence, writerly nuance and reasoned portrayal of lust displayed on the Tumblr post.Įspecially on ‘Pilot Jones’ and ‘Lost’, incidentally both Channel Orange‘s best and most pop tracks. It’s obvious that the person who penned “human beings spinning in blackness, all wanting to be seen, touched, heard, paid attention to” isn’t your average r’n’b male, but after Channel Orange goes number one, the dam could burst.
The real story here is the baton of mainstream r’n’b being passed to the guy who wrote so lyrically, sensitively and skilfully in that now seminal Tumblr post. In the end, though, inevitably the social angle comes second. And how often can you say that about even the nastiest Swedish death-rock? Arguably it’s mainstream r’n’b’s most iconoclastic gesture in decades, wiping the floor with a dozen Odd Future albums brimming with fantasy rape and, uh, homophobia. A male popstar singing “You’re so buff and strong” about the boy he once loved is downright subversive, end of story. Then there’s the intriguing new suggestion of double meaning in ‘Thinking About You”s “It was my first time, a new feel” or sweetly strummed closer ‘Forest Gump’ which proves that even in 2012 music has the power to jar folk from their apathy. Imploring his taxi driver / priest to drive faster, so to “outrun the demons”, over church organ Ocean sings “I have three lives balanced on my head like steak knives” We’re talking about higher stakes and deeper secrets here, the total fear of societal rejection and being forever lonely in your profane lust. There’s no doubt that on ‘Bad Religion’, r’n’b’s eternal tussle between pleasures of the flesh and godliness is made additionally poignant by the fact that it’s homosexual love in question. For one, it’s outright overt throughout (Ocean had to be anticipating the reaction he received last week).
Yes, Ocean’s sexuality is relevant in the listening of Channel Orange. In the “shit that really matters” periodic table it’s down there with “Did Han Solo or that green thing shoot first?” or, y’know, Nick Clegg. So he likes a little Richard with his Judy.
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