I’m seated in Ariel Pink’s apartm— “Hello?” Hold on. Mrs. Linda Rosenberg Kennett is calling her son. Pink, sitting in his muddled living room in a Hispanic section of L.A.’s Highland Park, puts her on speakerphone. She’s talking about getting insurance for his car, but I’m no longer paying attention. A minute ago, Pink called out to the next room, where a blanket fortress has been erected near the apartment’s lone air conditioner unit. And now there’s a ripple from one cloth wall. A girl crawls out, her long brunette hair obscuring her face but not the fact that she’s topless. In heels and a pleated skirt, she arranges herself then saunters into the living room. As Pink listens to his mother’s rigmarole of Geico rates, the busty fortress dweller nonchalantly checks her iPhone. I avert my gaze to the wall and notice that one of the

room’s few non-crooked paintings features a suave man in repose as three women lean against him. Down one side of his pant leg, in gold and crimson, is the title, “Symphony of the Nymph”, which is also the name of a song on Mature Themes, Pink’s second studio album for 4AD and thirteenth or so in all. The Eurotrash-y track might be the most ludicrous song on the record, which is saying plenty, especially since it comes after a spittle-flecked ode to eating wiener schnitzel entitled “Schnitzel Boogie”. After he gets off the phone with mom, Pink notices my gawp and casually sings a snatch of the song: “She’s a nympho at the bibliotech/ Dr. Mario, colonoscopist…” I still snicker at that rhyme scheme, but Pink is quick to explain: “Dr. Mario the colonoscopist, that’s my dad. His name is Mario. Seriously.” Sure enough, there is a listing for a Dr. Mario Z. Rosenberg in Beverly Hills. “He’s a colonoscopist, and I’m an ass man,” says Pink, firing up a cigarette. “Just by total coincidence.” Outside of a small circle of Angelenos, the music world’s first encounter with Pink occurred back in 2004, when Animal Collective plucked his handmade

CD-R The Doldrums off of their tour van floor and reissued it on their own Paw Tracks label. The scratchy cover photo showed a shirtless Pink looking like Jim Morrison’s prodigal son crashing a family reunion set in a graveyard, wearing only a pair of gold draw- string sweatpants. The music within was even seamier, evoking images of the Manson family frolicking at the Spahn Ranch, San Pornando Valley, and the black mold that grows within otherwise meticulous McMansion walls. If you could be inside Philip K. Dick’s speed-addled skull when Todd Rundgren came on the radio, it’d sound something like The Doldrums. Seeming at once half-assed and four-lobed, it was easy to be confused by it; splitting hairs about whether Pink’s a master or a joker misses the point since a true pop charlatan is often both. For a man whose discography sat at the bottom of a closet mud-slide for years, he’s regaled with “visionary” tags from a generation of fans and fellow artists. “Ariel is the mad genius and the best songwriter of our time,” gushed former Girls frontman Christopher Owens. “Something like The Doldrums allows you to participate in it, because you are imagining what he is trying to

do along with him,” says Cole Marsden Greif Neill, onetime guitarist for Pink’s band Haunted Graffiti, current engineer for Beck and co-producer of Mature Themes. Along with his wife, Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez, Cole M.G.N. relocated to Los Angeles in part to be closer to Pink, a man they both consider to be a visionary. Indie artists whose approach to pop is all gauzy layers and frayed edges—ranging from Neon Indian to MGMT to Toro y Moi to Dâm-Funk—have all huffed Ariel Pink’s sound smog. With the recent news that old records are now out-selling new ones, Pink’s anachronistic properties feel all the more prescient. He’s at once a relic and relevant, someone who sat in his apartment in the 21st century and rendered music that sounded like moldering tapes from a cult musician forgotten by the 60s. A breaking artist who’s also a touchstone to a whole generation of modern musicians. He never quite went away, yet he’s experiencing a career renaissance, with his 2010 4AD debut Before Today selling 10 times more than The Doldrums ever did. For those who spent years “imagining” along with that early run of Haunted Graffiti albums and revering this strange character, the spike can feel like an alternate-universe inevitability.

A week before the insurance call from Pink’s mother, the singer invites me into his house, his long stringy hair evoking Kurt Cobain’s fuchsia period. He apologizes for the mess, saying he recently kicked a girl out for turning his place into “a zombie drug den.” Cases of Dos Equis and Canada Dry are on the carpet along with a Tascam eight-track and Yamaha keyboard. Kierkegaard’s Fear & Trembling sits on a cluttered coffee table. Pink wears a sweatshirt with silver sequins, apparently impervious to the afternoon heat. Inside, the only breeze comes from a giant green fly zipping around the room. Whenever Pink stands to pace the carpet, his posture suggests a question mark. There’s red nail polish on his left hand, an unlit cigarette quivering on his unpainted right. When a can tips over, the spilled ginger ale is left to join the other stains. He talks about his ex, twisted pop chanteuse Geneva Jacuzzi, and says that the first line of Mature Themes—“A Kinski Assassin blew a hole in my chest/ Now I walk with a dream bullet vest”—references their split. He claims it’s his break-up album, and in that light the forlorn jangle of the title track and the wistful “Only in My Dreams” feel repentant and

sincere. “I’m extremely heartbroken right now,” he says, both hands approximating the hole in his chest. After seven years together (and six months touring in support of Before Today), Jacuzzi dumped Pink in the beginning of 2011. “I affected Ariel’s process by ripping his heart into a thousand slabs of sashimi,” she writes via email. “Bleeding and gushing is good for sad song- making.” She’s given a songwriting credit on “Dreams” and can be seen kicking Pink out of an apartment in the song’s video. “I’m still a basket case, man,” says Pink. “I’m back to where I was before The Doldrums, confidence-wise.” But he then mocks the notion of sincerity, or maturity for that matter. “It’s actually kind of stupid. ‘Kinski Assassin’ also goes: ‘Suicide dumplings dropping testicle bombs.’” Later, he’ll tell another interviewer that Mature Themes isn’t a break-up album at all. Pink is frank one moment, arch the next, juvenile soon after. Rather than discuss the album, he wants to talk about his theory on sexual orientation and why men turn gay in prison. But Mature Themes—for all of its nymph symphonies, she-males hopped up on speed, and colonscopists—is worth discussion. The

aforementioned “Schnitzel Boogie” switcheroos the Viennese cutlet with “feelin’ schizo” and then pulls off the finest drive-thru order in a pop song since Ween’s “Pollo Asado”, sounding like some weird demo left off of Paul McCartney’s Ram (oddly, the original version of “Symphony of the Nymph” also featured an interpolation of the Beatles’ “Love Me Do”). Nowadays, pastiche has become as crucial an attribute as musicianship in conveying an artist’s cultural heft, but try to play spot-the-influence with Pink’s music, and the task quickly turns Sisyphean. Rather than a few clever touchstones, the ears are overwhelmed with every single possibility, eventually exhausting only your knowledge of the pop canon. Imagine if, on “Losing My Edge”, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy actually mimicked all of the artists name-checked in the song. “Ariel is referencing old music and trying to rip it off,” insists Cole M.G.N. “But you can’t locate the source. It’s pointing towards something, but it’s so murky you can’t clearly see what it is, so you start to try to fill it in yourself.” Somewhere in the shadows between music and memory, Pink is lurking, churning the Grade A beef of pop’s past into something more akin to pink slime.

“I really wanted to make the worst thing, the thing that even people who liked bad, terrible music wouldn’t like, the stuff that people would ignore, always. Something really, really stupid. Something that is destined for failure.” So Ariel Pink states his lifelong ambition, one couched in childhood spite. “I don’t think I threw myself into music because I had the best intentions; it was because I was really angry. My dad was like, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ And I was just like, ‘Rock Star.’ I didn’t know how to do shit. I didn’t have any ability.” He had to know something about pop to title his first song “Sexy Lady” though, singing it to his mother at the age of 10. He claims to have written Before Today’s “I Can’t Hear My Eyes” around that time, too. “I heard all the arrangements in my head, the whole thing. It kind of vibrates in my head, the beat sounds more like clicking there.” With that he demonstrates his knack to beat box the rhythmic patterns metronome-ing in his skull while simultaneously humming a melody. He picks up a nearby Danelectro guitar and plays along with a recording he recently saved to his Android phone.

It’s precisely in this same method that he conveyed the fragments of Mature Themes to his bandmates for them to assemble. “I had hundreds of these in my mind and I just flipped through them. I had a very active inner life as a kid. There’s a good album or two worth of stuff that I can bring out on a rainy day if I have a loss for inspiration or whatever—even now.” Ariel Marcus Rosenberg was a child of divorce by the age of three, and he admits to being a troubled kid growing up in Louisiana. He was also obsessed with heavy metal, diving deeply into Morbid Angel, Metallica, and Christian Death. During a rough patch in junior high, he shipped out to Mexico City to stay with his cousins, where he first heard the Smiths and the Cure. When he went to live with his father and attend Beverly Hills High School, he sold off his metal collection and rebranded himself as a goth. It also marked his last dalliance with new music: “Metal was the last current thing I kept up with. After that, my listening was totally retro. My mind was closing itself off from the rest of the planet.” When he later goes on a diatribe about the state of modern music, he berates the likes of Alanis Morrissette and Natalie Imbruglia as if it’s still 1997.

Throughout his years at Beverly Hills High, Pink doodled in his notebooks and experimented with his four-track, recording the worst music he could conceive of, mostly on an unplugged bass and a three-string guitar recorded through a set of headphones, which he used as a microphone. He ingested whatever he could get his hands on: Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Can, the Cure, Suicide, and most of all, Lou Reed. “I wanted to live in another era and be forever 21, like in the gatefold photos of old albums,” says Pink. “I loved how I could just enter this world. I totally fetishized it.” Pink’s draughtsman skills got him into Cal Arts, but he soon switched his focus to music. Fellow student and early Haunted Graffiti member Tim Koh recalls often seeing him at a record store he worked at in 1996: “He always wore these red clogs and a sweatshirt with no shirt underneath—he just looked like a weird guy.” Just shy of earning his degree, Pink dropped out of college and wound up living in the Ananda Marga Hindu ashram in the rundown neighborhood of Crenshaw. “There were like three shootings in front of my house, I got mugged there twice,” he says of the era. “But I never had one noise complaint. I brought

in heroin, smoked so much pot, blasted music, lived in filth, brought all these fucking weirdos in, played and recorded music all night, and never had a problem with those people.” Those people included a Quasimodo-like Thai man, a Romanian chiropractor, devout Hindis, and an ever-smiling man who had survived the slaughter of his entire family in the African Congo. In such company, it was an inspired time for Pink’s dilapidated pop vision: House Arrest, Lover Boy, Scared Famous, FF>>, and portions of Worn Copy were all realized there. That creative spurt could partially be attributed to Pink finally encountering the music of fellow home recording obsessive R. Stevie Moore. At a drug house that Pink deemed the vinyl record equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, he came upon a compilation of Moore’s singular pop: “It seemed too good to be true, with his whole mythologizing of himself.” Pink contacted Moore in early 1999. “I often received demos from taper nerds, but the Haunteds were from a surreal plane,” Moore writes via email. “Ariel started sending me so much material that it eventually became a big blur; I couldn’t even totally wrap my head around his dozens of masterpieces.”

“On the L.A. scene, Ariel was seen as the lame drug guy”, says M.G.N., thinking back to his move to L.A. in 2006 to find the man. And for all his home-taping acumen, Pink was a train wreck live. I caught him on his 2004 tour at the Knitting Factory in New York City, mumbling into a mic and fiddling with a four-track, dressed as if he had just escaped Courtney Love’s condo in her baby doll. It was execrable. The New York Times called it “an experiment in driving two-thirds of the audience out the door.” Rather than an imaginary Haunted Graffiti, Pink tried assembling a real band to support him—featuring former Beachwood Sparks member Jimi Hey, John Maus, Gary War, girlfriend Jacuzzi, and more—but nothing held. Bassist Koh, who has also played with Cass McCombs and Gang Gang Dance, practiced his old friend’s music and returned to the fold after his short-lived first stint. “It’s the most difficult music I’ve ever tried to play,” Koh says of recreating Pink’s shut-in savant songs in real time. “Even something that sounds simple, like ‘For Kate I Wait’, took me months. I still don’t have it exactly.” With recent high school graduate Kenny Gilmore on keyboards, M.G.N. on guitar, and former Lilys drummer Aaron Sperske,

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti became a dependable enough live act and wound up signed to 4AD. For once, rather than write, play, sing, layer, mix, and release everything himself, Pink found himself in the exotic position of having a full band, an iconic label behind him, and studio time at his disposal. But nothing came easy on Before Today. “It was a nightmare to record,” says Koh. “It got so bad, I quit, and Cole quit. So we ended up recording most of it again at my house just to fix all the shit that producer Sunny Levine did wrong.” And after the wellspring that had birthed eight entries in the Haunted Graffiti series, Pink hadn’t written new material in five years. Instead, the band pored over old scraps. The record’s marquee track, “Round and Round”, “was like two songs in one,” remembers M.G.N. “We wrote new parts and rearranged it in a total ramshackle way into a very-not-cohesive song.” That such a Frankenstein-like concoction cemented Pink’s status as a vital indie pop auteur is an irony not lost on him: “I’m not trying to break new ground. That’s part of the whole point. The stagnation of things is inherent in my cerebral process.” “I’m just this fake musician who really gets off on people thinking that he’s a musician,” he says, now

seated across from me at a Mexican restaurant within spitting distance of his apartment, picking fajita meat out and leaving all the vegetables untouched. “That’s probably what keeps me going, but it’s just a little bit harder for me to do it than other people—I’m a little like Cat Power in that sense.” When it came time to play before thousands of fans at Coachella, in 2011, Pink went into meltdown mode and refused to sing, suggesting that maybe he isn’t ready to become the rock star he grew up dreaming about. But the chaos of the band is a true reflection of the state of Pink’s day-to-day life. The week I visit him, Pink fires Sperske. (In August, the drummer— who claims he was illegally “squeezed out” of an “oral partnership” with the group—filed a fittingly absurd $1 million lawsuit against Pink.) There’s a question of who will play drums in the band for the imminent tour, but such uncertainty seems typical. “It’s just one rough patch to the next,” Koh shrugs. Pink feels his music is appropriate for such turmoil, for Western culture nearing its nadir. “You dilute the whole culture to a point where people—as a last resort—start listening to something like Ariel Pink,” he posits as explanation of his newfound audience,