Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon.

This is your host, DJ Louis the 14th, reminding you to please rate review and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you're listening to it right now. Follow us on social at Pop Pantheon Pod and myself at DJ L-O-U-I-E-X-I-V on Twitter and Instagram. We have merch at Poppantheonpod.com and our Patreon show, Pop Pantheon, All Access, when we publish bonus episodes of this show,

is available at patreon.com slash Poppantheon, or you can subscribe for the audio only directly

in the Apple Podcasts app. This week, we are discussing Charlie XX's sixth studio album, Brat,

so you won't want to miss that. Okay, gorgeous, gorgeous is happening this weekend,

June 15th. That is Saturday in L.A. This is our L.A. Pride Party. I'm so excited about it.

There's a few tickets left, so I can't wait to see everybody there. If you want to cop a ticket

before, you can grab it in the show notes of this episode. And then of course, next Friday,

June 28th in New York at the Sultan Room in Bushwick, we have our Pride party, gorgeous, gorgeous Pride, New York City. That is sold out online, but there will be tickets at the door. So show up and grab your ticket at the door for that. If you don't already have it, I cannot wait for both of those parties. I'm so excited.

All right. And speaking of Pride Month, today for our A-side, we are talking about one of the most

important and enigmatic queer pop figures of the modern era. This is, of course, Frank Ocean.

It would be hard to underplay Frank Ocean's pop radicalism, which is a funny thing to say about a guy whose music trends towards low-key, quietly observational, and, over the course of his decade plus in the spotlight, increasingly ethereal avant R&B.

But Ocean is indeed a pop star disruptor in at least two seismic ways.

The first is how he's built his stardom, arriving on the

scene by skirting major labels and dropping his understated but rapturous breakthrough mixtape

Nostalgia Ultra in 2011 at the height of the Maximus EDM era, simply by uploading it to Tumblr

one night. The organic success of Ultra, along with his increasingly idiomatic, insular, and

unconventional records since,

most of which occurred without the help of pop charts and radio, instantly marked him as

a linchpin in the ever-populating cult pop star ecosystem, the genre's default mode in the days

since. The second, of course, is the way that Ocean openly shared his queerness, both in a famous

public letter, as well as across his debut album,

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