Frank Ocean on stage
Ever since hip-hop and urban succeeded indie as popular culture’s music genre of choice, watered down rappers in baseball jackets have become as ubiquitous as skinny jeans and shaggy hair once were. It’s now hard to tell the Drakes from the B.O.Bs and Taio Cruz’ and Gym Class Heroes.
And with the exception of Kanye West and Tinie Tempah, they’ve hardly set the fashion world alight. But newcomer Frank Ocean is different. In an area of the industry where it’s getting rapidly more difficult to have any musical credibility he seems to have succeeded, with a debut mix tape that’s receiving real critical acclaim. He also looks kind of awesome.
Frank Ocean
The 24 year old, revealed last month as number 2 in the BBC’s prestigious Sound of 2012 poll was born Christopher Breaux, but rather than adopting a stage name, he legally changed it to the more lyrical ‘Christopher Frank Ocean’.
Frank Ocean
A New Orleans native, he was forced to flee his home town with the onset of Hurricane Katrina, and lost months work of music when the studio he’d been working in there was subsequently looted.
His destination was California - a trip that was supposed to end after six weeks that’s still going. He wrote songs for Beyoncé and R Kelly and became part of Odd Future, an LA hip hop collective whose controversial rapping seemed to have the American public falling in and out of love with them every day.
Frank Ocean
Despite his membership in the group, Ocean’s sound is miles from their work - for starters he sings. And with the smooth, lovely voice of a heart-throb. Just with incredibly explicit material. His songs have an easy, tuneful sound to them, melodic rather than aggressive. Impressive, given that songs like
Novacane and
Swim Good tackle subjects such inadvertently getting high from a cocaine related anaesthetic and murdering your girlfriend, alongside the usual relationship agonies. Musically, Ocean likes to take interesting genres that might not usually be associated with the tone of hip hop and r’n’b, and makes them relevant. As he explained, when describing his song
American Wedding (a personal favourite in the farfetch.com office) as bluegrass, ‘Bluegrass is swag’.
Frank Ocean
Then there are the clothes. What’s really special about Ocean is that he has somehow managed to bypass what had previously appeared to be the only two sartorial options for men in his line of music – typical hip hop bling, or faux preppy. The easiest way of describing his look is as sporty meets smart with an ethnic twist.
A picture of sneakers Ocean uploaded to his own Tumblr
Yes there are the flashy
sneakers and the quirky
hats, the geeky
glasses and the shirts buttoned all the way up, but more interesting is his penchant for unusual or tribal prints and motifs on
shirts and
sweaters, and the way he adds a sense of fun to a plain white button-down by tying a brightly coloured
tie around his head. These days it’s rare to come across a musician with a truly individual sense of style, but it looks like Ocean has the potential. We can’t wait to see how his wardrobe grows as his fame does!