Last Tuesday, Ariel Pink, the Los Angeles musician known for pop songs that are catchy and inscrutable in equal measure, jumped into an S.U.V. outside his Williamsburg hotel and plugged in his iPhone as he headed to Staten Island for a gig. He directed his attention to Twitter, where he had become a sudden target of vitriol. An Australian Web site had just published an interview in which Pink said that Madonna’s label had asked him to write songs for her new album, which Pink thought was smart, given the “downward slide” of her career. This assessment did not sit well with Madonna—the Queen of Pop “has no interest in working with mermaids,” her manager said—or her fans. “Keep yourself in your irrelevant world, u’re nobody,” one tweeted. “All right, MySpace has chimed in,” Pink said, reading a tweet from the social network’s official account. “ ‘Ariel Pink is indie rock’s most hated man right now.’ Yes!”

Pink, who is thirty-six and has shoulder-length blond hair, has been an indie darling for the better part of a decade: Pitchfork, the Millennials’ Rolling Stone, named “Round and Round” the best song of 2010, and Entertainment Weekly declared a recent concert, during which Pink crowd-surfed with a beer, to be the singer’s “coronation as some sort of hipster king.” “I’ve been the next big thing for, like, ten years now,” Pink said. He wore an unbuttoned plaid shirt over a plunging V-neck, with splotches of red nail polish on both thumbs. “I feel really old.”

Conversations with Pink tend to veer off course. “I love pedophiles. And I love necrophiliacs,” he once told an interviewer, who had asked about neither. In the car, Pink began to explain his feelings of persecution while fingering a cigarette with one hand and scrolling Twitter with the other. “What if I committed suicide and tweeted, ‘Thank you, guys. You were right’?” he said, of Twitter’s mob mentality, which he then equated with the Hutu Power movement. “This is how, uh, Rwanda happened.” His publicist, a young woman, leaned forward preëmptively from the back seat. Pink was particularly irked that his criticism of Madonna had been deemed misogynistic, a charge that he has faced before. “Everybody’s a victim, except for small, white, nice guys who just want to make their moms proud and touch some boobies,” he said. His publicist gave up.

Pink saw his new album, “pom pom,” as a maturation. “My life project is to chill out and grow up,” he said. “I’m six years older than my dad was when he had me, and I just realized, you know, if I wait to have a kid, will I even be around to see him be my age?” One song on the new album begins with Pink declaring himself “the Sex King,” but ends with an admission that “all I wanted was a girlfriend all of my life.” Currently, “for a change,” he has one. “She’s a porn star—she was one of Charlie Sheen’s girls,” he said. “And she wants to have a kid.” As a backup plan, Pink logged on to the dating app Tinder while driving over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and began to swipe right—the medium’s indication of romantic interest—on every profile he saw. “This will increase my chances, right?” he said. Several dozen went by without any reply. Pink, whose profile reads, “Swipe left for a one-night stand with a pure soul,” thought the problem was the women, not him. “They don’t want a relationship,” he said. “They want a one-night stand with a tough guy. I’m just a little Chihuahua.”

Pink was visiting the PS 22 Chorus, a group of Staten Island fifth graders known for their covers of pop songs, including “Round and Round.” “Smokers are another persecuted group,” Pink said, as he finished his last cigarette near a “Drug-Free School Zone” sign. He buttoned up his shirt but declined an offer of gum before greeting Gregg Breinberg, the chorus’s director. “I used to be a teacher,” Pink said, referring to his time teaching art at a Jewish day school where he’d been a student. (His real surname is Rosenberg.) “My kids didn’t like me. I was passing out pink slips every five seconds, ’cause they kept coming up to me, like, ‘Ariel, are you a girl?’ ”

“That’ll be good to talk about with my kids,” Breinberg said, leading Pink to the school auditorium. “I try to make them tolerant.”

The chorus had learned two of Pink’s new songs: “Jell-o,” a manic jingle inspired by the dessert, and “Picture Me Gone,” a ballad lamenting the loss of physical photo albums. (“I backed up all my pictures on my iCloud / so you can see me when I die.”) Pink sang the verses of “Picture Me Gone” along with the kids, but forgot several lyrics. “Incredible!” he said, after nailing a second take. “I’ll send it to Madonna.” ♦