Enigmatic singer-songwriter Frank Ocean prefers to keep his private life guarded, so it’s always notable when he sits down for a print interview. In a new one with Gayletter published Tuesday, Ocean talked about past and upcoming projects and shed some light on what he does when he’s not making music.
Ocean, as it turns out, is a fan of VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, though he’s been busy lately and hasn’t been keeping up as he should. Ocean told the magazine that he watches the competition show “sometimes,” and he “[has] a friend who really likes it, so [he’s] seen a few episodes.”
And if Ocean were to guest judge on any reality TV competition show, he’d choose Drag Race over standard singing shows like The Voice. “I’ll say this,” Ocean said. “Of all the talent shows on TV, that would be the most likely.”
Ocean would be a great guest judge, especially since he knows a thing or two about performing with a stage name. When asked if he thinks of “Frank Ocean” as a persona adjacent to drag, Ocean said that he wasn’t thinking of his name as armor to protect his identity when he chose it. Ocean wanted to record music without his label knowing, and the name change was his creative way of working around that. “I was just trying to be slick,” Ocean said, “So I could do what I was doing without people knowing. And it worked. I kept with it. I’m such a part of the generation that’s influenced by rap and hip-hop. For me those sorts of names are so commonplace in the genre and in the culture, so it felt correct.”
You can read Ocean’s full interview with Gayletter here.
