ARIEL’ REVEN By Kev Kharas The air of mystery permeates with Ariel Pink and his band, H a u n t e d Graffiti.
“How we gonna sell this record to these morons, Ariel?” It’s somewhere around 2pm, or at least it was the last time anyone dared check, and the heat sears through an open window into Ariel M. Rosenberg’s stale Bel Air apartment. We’ve known each other a while now, introduced at one of Jimmy Iovine’s parties, and though brains are beyond boggled and nostrils blanched, there’s a familiar ease between us as we sit and soak in our clothes, hatching plans of attack for Ariel’s new album Before Today. “Who the fuck cares, man?” comes the drawled reply, finally, as Ariel rubs scum from his eyes and twirls the hairs on his effetely bloated gut. “Those saps’ll buy anything with my name on.” He burps the last part of that sentence, then wonders aloud if someone can go for more chicken. The girls get dressed. The dog keeps whining in the corner. Ariel’s new single, ‘Round And Round’, looms from the TV again so that our reality and its reality start to close in on each other. We brace like dying pilots: brows down, eyes up towards the screen, ready to hurtle headlong into whatever existential nixing our doppelgangers harbour. The cat, oblivious to this dick routine, sleeps because cats can’t break down THC once it’s in their blood. He’ll be stoned for months. Someone else in the room slurs something about giving the dog rum. “Fucking… dumb fucking dog!” Did anyone just say that? I may’ve imagined it. If you imagine another mind, can you imagine another mouth? And if you can imagine a mouth, and a mind, where’d you spit the mouthful of mind when someone gives you chocolate?
Whose teeth are these?! “Jesus fuck,” I spit, hot, white foam dribbling down my chin. “My mouth feels like it’s been sandblasted.” “Yeah, I had one of the girls take a shit in your mouth when you passed out last night.” “Oh,” I say. “I thought it was just the cocaine.” The above is a deleted scene from a movie never made — the feelgood-(then-bad) tale of a one-man bedroom cult thrust to the very apex of pop revere. Ariel’s Revenge, Act I: ‘The Early Years’ Ariel Marcus Rosenberg is born on June 24, 1978, in Pico-Robertson, a neighbourhood 20 car minutes south of Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills. He travels to Beverly Hills High School by carpool. Earliest musical memory? “Listening to Debbie Gibson’s ‘Shake Your Love’ in the carpool. Third grade. There’s nothing quite like that feeling, man — each moment and feeling’s unique, but if you wanna relive them, just go listen to what was playing at the time.” I guess it’s ‘the point’ of pop music to tether itself to certain moments in your life. “You could almost see it coming from the get-go; with what they were trying to do with pop music — to create instant memories so people could long after their not-so-distant pasts.”
It’s that attempt to turn every moment into an idyllic ‘golden age’, even if it happened last week. Personal moments get ossified and ‘trapped’ in pop songs just like they do in photographs. It’s a vain process in a way — that desire to ‘own’ other people’s time which is implicit in nostalgia. “The world’s speeding up, though. We enter the workplace as 20somethings and before we know it, we’re trapped there on the road to retirement. When we arrive, we have nothing to show for it but a handful of memories and songs that mark the time for us. And that’s supposed to keep us happy, you know?” You don’t know why you do things at that age — Ariel will put it down, later, to “senses of pride and identity” — but young Rosenberg sets about trapping his memories in sound bubbles with a lunatic zeal. His mother buys him a tape player and four cassettes (Guns N’ Roses, UB40, Def Leppard, a forgotten other) and he gets “very into metal”, his first obsessive musical love. The metal itself gets ever heavier, until one night Ariel returns 300 death metal CDs to a record store in LA. There are shifts through death rock, industrial, punk and noise before Ariel returns, after a stint as “your typical hipster record store jerk”, to… pop. “I could finally appreciate pop after hearing how it commingles with all the experimental stuff,” he’ll explain, later. Ariel’s Revenge, Act II: ‘Getting Naked With Pop’ Listen to Ariel’s music and you’ll hear the sound of pop turned inside out. The tussle between him and pop is present in all his music — a career’s ‘love interest’. The Doldrums, an album recorded in 1999 and released in 2004 through Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, gives pop a particular-
ly torrid time — it twists its blood, spits it back out as a mewling harlequin baby. In tracks like ‘Among Dreams’ and the stunning ‘For Kate I Wait’, Ariel sees pop’s quest to annex vast swathes of history and engages himself in a personal fight against the false dawn of every obnoxious ‘golden age’; every ossifying, empathy-desperate, homogenous and banal ‘big hit’. Why? To preserve his own experience: to confirm his own existence. His weapons are hints at pop’s dystopian future. ‘THINGS A DRUNK MIGHT ARGUE ARIEL PINK’S MUSIC HAS IN SOME WAY ‘PREDICTED’, AND LET’S NOT KID OURSELVES, WE ARE ALL DRUNKS.’ 1. The shattering of the music industry and, subsequently, of mass, musical empathy (i.e. ‘generation-defining’ hits by ‘icons’) except in rare cases (i.e. ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna). “Because Ariel makes generationdefining hits most of his generation will never hear.” 2. The lonely auteur’s retreat to the bedroom with cheaper production equipment and the internet. “Because Ariel has recorded several hundred songs at home on cassette since 1996, and on many he ‘plays the drums’ with his mouth and armpit. Because if he sang ‘Jules Lost His Jewels’ in the street, he’d get beaten up.” 3. The death of the band, subsequent to point 2. “Because Ariel Pink has a band called Haunted Graffiti now. This is merely an exercise in the perverse.” 4. The birth of post-generic pop, as stylistic codes and scene etiquettes start to collapse. In solitude and band-less, the ambiguity of private ideas,