* Live Review, 7/16/12: Frank Ocean Meets a Sea of Support at the Regency Ballroom
* Frank Ocean: The Only Band That Matters
In music this year, the moment that has meant the most to me didn't happen while playing a record or attending a show. It happened while reading a Tumblr. On July 4, when Frank Ocean posted an open letter at his website in which for the first time he referred to his relationship with another man, I was reminded why pop matters, after all.
Hip-hop remains one of the few genres where homosexuality is still taboo. A memorable 2008 book by former MTV executive Terrence Dean painted a picture of a gay hip-hop underground that read like an Edmund White novel: the complex interweaving of secrets and codes brings to mind the paranoid and besieged community of homosexual New Yorkers before the Stonewall Riots in 1969.
Four years on from Dean's book, if the situation has changed at all it's been at a glacial, almost imperceptible pace. Hip-hop's willful ignorance toward homosexuality has always been its least defensible blight (though some women might rightly disagree). So it wasn't your typical Adam Lambert moment when Ocean, who first gained notoriety as part of the somewhat gay-bashing Odd Future, revealed the details of his relationship and heartbreak.