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Ariel Pink
Ariel Pink Photograph: PR
Ariel Pink Photograph: PR

Ariel Pink: 'I'm not that guy everyone hates'

This article is more than 9 years old

Loved by Azealia Banks and Kurt Vile, loathed by Madonna and Grimes, this provocative pop prodigy wants to be ‘normal’… but often lets his mouth get the better of him


You can listen to an exclusive album stream of Pom Pom here


Let’s wipe the slate clean,” says the singer recently dubbed the most hated man in indie rock. “Forget you ever knew me, forget I existed. I’m Ariel Pink, this new artist you’ve never heard of, not that guy everyone hates.” It’s a nice try. Recently, the king of the LA freak scene has found himself at the centre of a minor media shitstorm, which he can’t help stirring every time he opens his mouth. “It’s not illegal to be racist”, “This gay marriage stuff pisses me off” and “I love necrophiliacs” are some of the more eyebrow-raising opinions he’s aired in previous interviews, sparking outrage in some quarters of the left-leaning indie community. Who is Ariel Pink? Either a political gargoyle who sits to the right of Mussolini, or a man who’s desperate not to be liked? I’ve come to meet him in an Italian restaurant near his home in LA’s Highland Park to try to find out which.

What we do already know is that Pink (real name Ariel Rosenberg) is perhaps the most wayward, ferociously individual artist currently working in the pop idiom. His albums veer perversely between musical styles, conveying childlike joy and ravaged nihilism, often within the course of the same song. His lyrics are a freeform poetry that have occasionally explored areas of transgender experience, and he’s been known to employ drum sounds produced with his armpit. His backstory has the cultish allure of the outsider artist. Holing himself up in the Los Angeles hills for five years at the turn of the millennium, Pink obsessively worked a crackpot vision: to re-imagine pop music itself. He used the crudest technology to splice bizarre elements – soft rock, post-punk, forgotten TV shows, voicemails – into dense musical gems, like someone building a DeLorean out of Hoover parts and stuff lying around the kitchen. His discography of oddity ran to bag-loads of cassettes and CDRs, several of which eventually found a release on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label.

Kurt Vilecredits him with reasserting the spontaneous, DIY authenticity of lo-fi culture, while his postmodern take on pop has found him tapped for collaborations by Sky Ferreira and Azealia Banks. Now on British label 4AD, Ariel’s new album Pom Pom is a dress-up box crammed with pop hooks, lush textures, silly voices and surprisingly affecting sincerity. But while the music is more inviting than ever, his refusal to toe conventional lines in interviews has made him a controversial figure.

So, is he a troll? “I’d like to be seen as a normal, attractive person with good values,” he replies, tucking into a plate of meaty pasta. So why say you love the Westboro Baptist Church? “Because they’re free-speech advocates.” You said you loved paedophiles… “Yes, like Jesus loved paedophiles. I don’t love them specifically. Does it make me a paedophile to love paedophiles?” He’s being glib, of course. There’s mischief in his grey eyes, as if he’s testing me, seeing if I’m going to be Bill Grundy to his Johnny Rotten.

I ask about his latest misadventure, in which he revealed he had been invited to write potential material for Madonna’s new album. His assessment of her “downward slide” was jumped on by Grimes, who blasted his “delusional misogyny” on Twitter. “What an amazing promotional campaign this is,” he chuckles. “I was only repeating what Interscope told me about why they needed me. They’re not my opinions. It’s clickbait journalism. The media lies to us all the time, and we always believe the media. Then Grimes – who’s completely stupid and retarded to believe any of it – jumps in and has her two cents. I’m not a misogynist. Maybe she’s angry that I’m the male version of her, who was at 4AD before her.”

Yowzer! I ordered the chicken, not the beef, I think – although much later. Instead, I ask: don’t celebrities have a duty to be role models? “No, they have a duty to be people you can break down, because everyone feels ashamed for knowing who they are, and hates themselves for paying so much attention.” You disagree with celebrity culture? “No, I disagree with the masses, who see themselves as very passive. The American people don’t feel responsible for murders that happen elsewhere in the world by the US army, or that for every $2 box of chocolates they buy their grandmother, someone dies.”

Pink has a particular tendency to pull radically insightful arguments from nowhere – about sensationalist media, the amorality of capitalism, liberal delusion – and cloak them in clangingly reactionary or inflammatory conclusions. For some reason, he starts talking about the president of Uruguay. “He lives in a hut with his wife and grows pot or whatever. He gives all his wealth back to the people.” What a nice man, I think, like the PC sucker I am. “No! He’s trying to curry favour, give everyone what they want. It’s machiavellian.”

There’s a strange integrity I admire in Pink’s willingness to not only deviate from the artist’s script of kneejerk liberalism, but to rip it up entirely. There’s a tyranny in orthodoxy, and the man at odds with his society is also freed of it. But the burden of thinking for himself, rejecting all external values, leads him into some strange places. Trying to steer things toward the positive, I ask if there’s anyone he really likes. “I love everybody. You have to embrace all facets of humanity; love and accept everyone as being part of yourself. But on the other hand we’re scared of other people, who are our biggest threat. Once we figure out how to stop killing each other then we can figure out the trees and workers’ rights. You’re not gonna figure out the trees when you still have people killing each other.”

Ariel confesses to another tactic: to never stop talking once he starts, so the interviewer cannot ask any questions. And it’s really something: even the most prosaic question has him spiralling into comic abstraction and wild theories. At times it’s like he’s improvising Zen koans on the spot: “Everybody’s full of shit. The more sense they make, the more full of shit they are.” I’m not sure if this is the most meaningful conversation I’ve ever had in my life, or a load of old cabbage. Does anything mean anything? “We’re all making castles in the sand, wonderful tapestries, an exquisite corpse. But is it meaningful? No. It’s dogs barking. It doesn’t mean anything beyond our yelping, at the pain of being alive.” Of course, he howls at this point.

Ariel onstage during New york Fashion Week, 2012 Billy Farrell Agency/REX Photograph: Billy Farrell Agency/REX

Pink’s peculiar, scattershot worldview perhaps seems slightly less jarring once you’ve spent some time with his music, which flits between irony and sincerity, unafraid to sprawl into sonically profane territory. He eschews autobiographical lyrics, instead offering a fluorescent stream of subconscious association. There’s also much character writing in evidence on Pom Pom, notably the gorgeous, elegiac Picture Me Gone, a song written from the perspective of a middle-aged man imagining his own death, addressing his son from a future in which all that remains of him is digital information on an intangible computer server. Whereas the song preceding it is Black Ballerina, a grimy lo-fi funk groove in which a teenager is ejected from a strip joint for touching a dancer’s nipples. It’s hard to conceive of another imagination from which both these songs would spring.

We decide to continue our conversation over a drink. Unlike literally every single other person in LA, Ariel doesn’t drive, so we go next door to an empty sports bar. What’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you? “They called me a dork one time,” he recalls. “I never thought about myself that way, but I felt like a dork right then and there for taking offence to it. That’s how I deal with all issues – I embrace them as being the case, so I actually face them.” So when people say you’re a misogynist… “I am a misogynist! Yes, I have to deal with that.”

In this cavernous environment, he seems sadder, the grey eyes more vulnerable. I can start to see the guy whose parents divorced when he was two, who was bullied at school, who couldn’t relate to his colonoscopist dad’s professional milieu, who dropped out of college to live in a Hindu ashram, whose obsessive music-making has sometimes been a way to block out the world. “I got into music to hide my personality,” he admits. “I could sing in different voices, use cover pictures that looked nothing like me. I wish I wasn’t the singer in my band. Now I’m the distraction from the music. I wouldn’t like me, either.”

The sparky humour has left the conversation now. “I wish I didn’t get all this attention, have to do interviews,” he says. “I don’t want to be known. I’d like to get by without making a fool of myself, running my mouth all the time. It’s not helping me.” He’s wary yet resigned to his treatment in the media, convinced I’m going to sell him down the river when this piece appears. He seems clouded, troubled. “My deal with 4AD is a joke,” he announces at one point, in front of the woman from 4AD.

“I think I’ve given you enough,” he says finally, picking up his Camels as if he’s packing up a stall. I feel he’s tired of me, of interviews, of the whole world. As he goes to leave, he makes an untypically straightforward plea. “Don’t make me into a weird caricature of myself. I’m trying to be an individual, I’m not guarded. We should be able to air stuff without being hunted down.”

The most hated man in indie rock half turns back to me: “Just… say something nice.”

Pom Pom is out on 17 Nov; Ariel Pink plays the Scala, N1, 17 Nov



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