Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 12/11/2012 at 10:44 AM Videos

The Popdust Files: covers, fake plastic trees, frank ocean, radiohead

There aren’t many currently active artists out there who have released an album as acclaimed and generally beloved as Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, but UK alternative legends Radiohead have done it at least three times, first with 1995′s more stadium-ready LP The Bends. Ocean bridged the gap between the two generations of critical darlings over the weekend with a brief cover of the best-remembered song from the album, the Britpop-era power ballad “Fake Plastic Trees,” as the intro to his own track “Voodoo” at a Spotify press conference in New York.

It’s a good choice of cover for Ocean, and the song’s lyrical themes even kinda echo in Ocean’s own “Sweet Life” and “Lost,” among other tracks on Orange. If Frank came of age as an art student in Oxford in the ’90s, his first few albums might have had more than a few things in common with early ‘Head. He’d probably still record interludes where he made fun of girls for preferring to listen to Jodeci, though.