Frank Ocean's mum wants Kim Burrell's vocal off 'Blonde' after homophobic rant, but now there's more reason to keep it on than ever
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Your support makes all the difference.Given his avoidance of social media, I imagine Frank Ocean to silently be thinking “oh mommmmmm” every time his mother tweets about his work.
Usually, Katonya Breaux’s quite charmingly just being proud of her boy, but on 1 January she made headlines, writing: “Me: Son, can we crop Kim Burrells voice out of your song??”, paraphrasing a lyric from Frank’s ‘U-N-I-T-Y' track and calling out the gospel singer (whose vocals are sampled briefly in 'Godspeed').
A video of Burrell (below) recently emerged of her leading a church sermon and describing homosexuality as a “perverted spirit” and, more biblically, “sin”.
It’s really quite boring to have to say this, but there is obviously no excuse for that kind of talk and no place for it in 2016 whatsoever. It’s abhorrent.
The idea is though, and many people agree with Breaux, that Frank should re-edit the track to cut out the snippet of Burrell’s vocal used, in order to refute her ideas, which are completely at odds with Frank, a bisexual man, and his music.
But to me this doesn’t make sense for a couple of reasons.
One, how can you alter a masterpiece? Blonde is an incredible record, and Burrell shouldn’t be given the satisfaction of seeing it changed.
Two, her vocal should stay in precisely because Frank is himself a member of the LGBTQ community. There’s actually something pretty baller about repurposing the voice of a homophobe for a song about everlasting love between two men (‘This love will keep us through blinding of the eyes / Silence in the ears / Darkness of the mind’) and making a ton of money off of it.
More than anything, Frank is simply too wise to partake in this bullsh*t. He’s above it. While Burrell disguises hatred as religion in narrow-minded churches, he’ll be far away carving new forms of spirituality in the studio.
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