Frank Ocean has been on the record about not identifying as an R&B singer. As much as he loves the genre, he didn’t feel like it fully encapsulated him. “Unfortunately, it probably has something to do with my ethnicity. That’s just what it is,” Ocean told journalist Jeff Weiss in an old interview. “I’m definitely influenced by rhythm and blues, as much as I’m influenced by other s*** that I listen to. I think that it’s like a lot of music that’s progressive in new ways. It’s a fusion of at least a couple genres. I’m not saying that this is my manifesto or anything, but it’s definitely not a straight-up R&B record.”However, it wasn’t just R&B for Frank Ocean. Instead, he suggested that genres as a concept didn’t make sense anymore. In an interview with The Quietus, he stressed that he was a singer/songwriter in a broader sense. The label “allows me to move a little bit more freely.” Ultimately, he felt like genres were a limiting construct to keep artists in a box. Frank Ocean Says Genres Don’t Truly Represent Artists Anymore“It’s not about genre, though. I think these days if you’re a purist to a certain genre, I dunno, it feels a little dated to me,” Frank Ocean said. “I think so many genres have rubbed off on each other all the time, and… it’s just dated. It’s played out, it’s over, it’s done. Stop. Genres are like, I don’t know, unless we come up with a new system, but I don’t think you need that, I think in the arts, what do you need that for?”When pressed to explain why genres are a dated concept, Ocean believed that it just didn’t accurately represent artists as a whole. He primarily used John Mayer as the shining example— he saw a little bit of pop, blues, R&B, and blues to Mayer’s music. So what makes him just a rock artist?“Is he rock just because he has a guitar? I think that’s unfair to him, because he’s doing a lot of things,” Frank Ocean said. “Whereas some artists, it might be totally accurate. If I was talking about Wynton Marsalis or Herbie Hancock… Well, Herbie Hancock, it might be unfair to him sometimes, because he’s versatile as well, but it’s gonna be jazz. I’m sorry, I’ve gone off on a tangent, I’m gonna go off on a tangent about genres.”Ultimately, he compared himself to R&B greats of the past like Usher and Marvin Gaye. When looking at a song like “Novacane”, he didn’t see how they aligned lyrically. “I didn’t take that kind of storytelling from R&B. I took it from hip-hop. If you listen to that record and you don’t at least give a little bit of the props to hip hop and what came from that, then you’re limiting it. And that’s why I always say that about the genre thing, because that’s what it does,” Frank Ocean continued. “When you say ‘it’s that’, you listen to it in certain way. And you might not necessarily miss it, but it’s just inaccurate, and you’ll miss a couple of things, contextually.”The post Frank Ocean Has a ‘Progressive’ Opinion on Music Classificiation That Prioritizes ‘Fusion’ Over Labels appeared first on VICE.