Brad Pitt’s favourite modern musician: “He’s very, very special”
Brad Pitt is such an arbiter of all things cool that you could argue that he has single-handedly skewed perceptions of Americans globally. If you don’t want to be Brad Pitt, then the odds imply that you must, therefore, be Brad Pitt himself. The actor remains one of the last of a dying breed of genuine Hollywood stars in the swaggering sense of the word.
As Quentin Tarantino recently said: “He suggests an older-style movie star. He’s really good-looking. He’s also really masculine and he’s also really hip; he gets the joke.… But the thing that only the directors that work with Brad and the actors that act opposite him really know, what he’s so incredibly talented at, is his ability to really understand the scene. He might not be able to articulate it, but he has an instinctive understanding about it.”
Continuing his GQ eulogy by adding: “He’s one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars, It’s just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don’t think you can describe exactly what that is because it’s like describing starshine.”
Thus, anything that Pitt says about the arts is touched with an air of authority. So, when it comes to his favourite modern musician, we’re all ears. Speaking to Rolling Stone, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood leading man explained how his painful divorce from Angelina Jolie forced a reshaping of his record collection.
Pitt dove head-first into Marvin Gaye’s famed 1978 divorce album (like a break-up album with the added true heartache of legislation thrown in), Here, My Dear. Pitt says that the album made an entire genre click for him. “I just got R&B for the first time,” the Oscar winner said. “R&B comes from great pain, but it’s a celebration. To me, it’s embracing what’s left. It’s that African woman being able to laugh much more boisterously than I’ve ever been able to.”
This revelation of R&B’s ability to approach the bass of the blues with a bit of dancing rhythm sent Pitt “down a road” of discovery. The ever-open-minded star decided to ditch his old favourites like Nick Drake and Pearl Jam for a hot minute to check out some new songwriters. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Ocean,” he said. “I find this young man so special. Talk about getting to the raw truth. He’s painfully honest. He’s very, very special. I can’t find a bad one.”
Ocean has returned the compliment too after he sported a T-shirt sporting the image of Pitt at the Parklife Festival. Likewise, Pitt has been spotted at recent Ocean concerts proving his love for the “special” singer has far from diminished.
