Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
House Arrest
The title “House Arrest” sounds like an allusion to Ariel’s reclusive, home-bound lifestyle circa its 2002 recording. His world revolved around a one-room apartment above an ashram in Crenshaw, South Central LA. The living space was spartan: “I had my bed on the ground, I didn’t have any furniture – just my little Sanyo stereo, two speakers and the 8-track recorder right in front of it. There was a table in the corner and a bunch of garbage bags full of my clothes.” He had to share a bathroom with several other people who lived on the upstairs floor above the ashram.
Ariel fell into a routine. By day, he worked as an art
teacher’s assistant at an elementary school (the same one he’d attended as a
kid, in fact). Come four in the afternoon, he’d head home. Contravening the
ashram rules he’d signed as a condition of living there - which among other things strictly forbad
strong flavors like garlic and smoking - Ariel ordered kung po chicken delivery every
night and got stoned. Then he slipped on headphones and started recording. He made music all evening and deep into the
night.
Ariel lived there for two years and only left because he got
mugged twice right outside the house. “I would've stayed there for longer –
that was by far my most productive period. I recorded five albums while I was
there. I was working all night, so I don’t even know when I slept. Maybe I
slept every other day, I can’t remember. Certainly I was burning the candles at
both ends.”
The best part of the day was when the sun came up and Ariel
was finally able to take off the headphones and play what he’d recorded through
proper speakers. “Getting really stoned and listening to it - trying to pretend
like I’d never heard it before.”
Ariel would come up with track sequencings for albums, make CD
covers using color-marked Polaroids, get them miniaturized and printed at
Kinko’s. But he was still a long way from having an audience. “I had two or three friends in my life,
barely, and even fewer than that knew me as a musician. There was just John
Maus. My wife didn’t think of me that way. And I wasn’t playing live to turn
people on.”
His appearance wasn’t super-inviting either in those days: red clogs with eyeballs painted on them, grey
sweats (“the slumlord look”, he calls it), no shirt but just a hoodie zipped
down. “A Nazi space monk, a German hippie with a very sick, death obsession,”
is how Ariel describes his image, adding – not wholly convincingly - “there’s
definitely lots of people that felt that style.”
Asked whether he was making the music just for himself at
this point, Ariel nods and says “and just for a sense of purpose in life. I was
really infused with the Lord, so to speak.”
The man’s religious love and awe for pop announces itself
with the opening track on House Arrest, the rhapsodically melodic “Hardcore
Pops Are Fun.” Somewhere between a hymn
and a mission-statement, its lyrics are deceptively off-the-cuff, but lay out
the Ariel Pink credo in clearly devotional terms: “Pop music is free/For you and me…. Pop music is wine, it tastes so divine”. The
“hardcore” in the title “Hardcore Pops Are Fun” is Ariel’s playful way of
asserting the deadly seriousness of his dedication to pop as craft and vocation:
his belief that prettiness and sweetness can be as intense and powerful as supposedly more challenging and
rule-breaking forms of music like noise, industrial, extreme metal. “Whatever I
was doing I thought was really heavy, but in a different sense.” There’s an echo of Lou Reed on “Heroin” in
the line “Pop music’s your wife/Have it for life”: pop as addiction, as
God-surrogate, as an absolute commitment.
“Interesting Results”, the track that immediately follows,
is “another total manifesto song”, Ariel
says. You could slot it into the
tradition of self-reflexive showbiz songs – ABBA’s “Thank You For the Music”,
Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”, Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” – except that
it’s far more interesting, taking you inside Ariel’s process. The song freeze-frames
the moment just before taking the plunge into creation, hesitant and crinkled
with doubt. “Will I write /A song you
love / Today?/There’s no way to tell/And who cares/Well I don’t,” Ariel teases
the listener, adding in mock self-deprecation “Thank the Lord that my standards
for success are so low”. The chorus swings the other way into ebullient confidence:
“Every time / I pick up a pen/ I get / Interesting results/Every time / I sit
down and try/I get /Extra-terrestrial results”. The kicker at the end turns it
around on Ariel’s – then non-existent – audience: “It may not be much, but
let’s see you try.” Ariel laughs
in recollection: “That was me really trying to milk the meta-narrative, for
lack of anything to actually write about!”
“Getting High In the Morning”, another stand-out track on
House Arrest, could also be construed – at a pinch – as a working-methods-revealed
song. It sounds frazzled, the corrugated
riffs and effects-soaked textures resembling a malfunctioning TV set whose
color balance is grotesquely out of whack. Ariel compares it to Zappa at his
most zany and to ‘International Feel’ on Todd
Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star.
That late Sixties acid rock vibe resurfaces on “Netherlands.”
Here the brittle, painfully bright guitar recalls Jefferson Airplane’s After
Bathing At Baxter’s - Ariel’s piercing, high-pitched, edging-into-too-sharp
vocal even sounds like Grace Slick. There’s that same sense of perceptions
stripped raw, of visionary overload straining the nervous system to breaking
point. “It’s got that Moby Grape on a bender vibe,” nods Ariel. “That totally
fried thing. The fuzz bass.”
Ariel is a deep scholar of Sixties psychedelia, although his
tastes lean less to the Nuggets-y raw ‘n’ basic garage punk end of
things and more to the pop-psych: the Byrds, the first Love LP, Electric
Prunes, even Strawberry Alarm Clock. “I just love the Sixties”. He likes to say
that he “brought the Eighties to the Sixties” – a joke, but one that does
convey, if somewhat inscrutably, the sense that something else is going on here
than the usual kind of revivalist procedure: something more uncanny. Obsolete
technology (the long-discontinued Yamaha 8-track), dead musical languages,
disinterred memories, and a lifetime of poring over recordings and assimilating
the sonic signatures of their specific Zeitgeists - all converge to conjure
songs that suggest parallel pop realities or counterfactual histories, how
things could have gone down if…
Temporal sequence gets scrambled, history goes haywire. “The People I’m Not”, for instance, is
described by Ariel as “a demo from Rocket From the Tombs, but playing a
Fleetwood Mac song – there’s some Tango In the Night, ‘tell me sweet little
lies’ vibe in there” – in other words, a song from a decade-or-more after the
Cleveland proto-punk group ceased to exist.
But it’s always personal with Ariel, never merely “record
collection rock”: clever-but-empty games
with taste and references, sterile crafting
of period-precise fakesimiles. He jokes
that his version of psych-rock is really “psychotherapy rock…. I’m always
going back to those earliest memories”.
Indeed there’s an unreleased song from the House Arrest / Worn Copy /Doldrums
era in which the 8-track is actually his shrink. The machine listens
patiently to Ariel unburdening himself, and then in a pitched-down,
masculine-medical voice offers soothing advice and support.
Of his lyrics, Ariel says “I have to trick myself… pretend
everything’s like a scratch track, write the words down quickly…. And then
later, I’m like ‘Nope, Ariel, the lyrics are done’.” Each lyric, he says, “is
like a little piece of me preserved against my will” – and the totality of them
add up to a warts-and-all psychological self-portrait. “There’s an ongoing
narrative under all this stuff. And it’s really like some weird transference
therapy thing”. Through his music, Ariel has found the missing link between The
Cure and the talking cure.
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