A Fan's Dilemma (3 of 3)

                             

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

Worn Copy

A counter-current to the digitalization of everyday life, analogue fetishism became one of the defining developments of the 2000s. Entire micro-genres sprang up oriented around cassette releases with handcrafted packaging, there was a burgeoning antique market for modular synths, and a resurgence of vinyl took off that would lead to overpriced platters popping up in Whole Foods next to the artisanal soaps and organic almond butter.

Arriving smack in the middle of the decade,  Worn Copy chimed with the emerging hip taste for the distressed and faded  - even when those effects, as with Hipstamatic, were actually digital simulations of decay and ageing.

The title Worn Copy had a particular reference, drawing attention to Ariel’s means-of-production: the 8-track Yamaha MT8X cassette-recorder. Where most of his DIY contemporaries used digital technology to record and then released the results on “dead media” formats like vinyl or cassette, Ariel’s process was analogue from the ground up.  The Yamaha MT8X is a long discontinued piece of equipment that – like the similar Tascam Portastudio – only existed for a few years before digital technology made it obsolete. Rather than the 2-inch or 3-inch reel-to-reel tape used in professional recording studios, these home studios recorded directly onto cassettes, where the tape was slightly wider than an eighth of an inch. Your master tape was a C60, C90, even a C120 if you were really cheapskate – something you could buy at Sam Goody or Radio Shack.

These were machines designed for amateur musicians looking to teach themselves the rudiments of mixing and overdubbing, or for songwriters and fledgling bands to record demos.  “The function, and appeal, of the Yamaha and Tascam, was that you had the studio and the mixing desk in one,” explains Ariel. “You didn’t need to have a reel-to-reel unit and a separate mixing board, and then another medium to dub copies down to from the master tape. You could monitor and record on a single machine.”  Very convenient, but the downside was a brutally reduced level of sound quality. The eight channels of sound on the mixer got distributed as eight bands across tape far thinner than the tape used in a recording studio. “Each band can’t process as much information, can’t take as much signal, without bleeding onto the other tracks”.

Ariel gives me a glimpse of his archive of master tapes. Rather than the film canister-like containers that word usually suggests, these are scores – maybe hundreds – of decidedly cheapo-looking cassettes. Most appear to be normal-bias (i.e. not the superior-grade chrome or metal tapes that hi-fi listeners preferred). A few even look like pre-recorded cassettes that he taped over. “I wanted to get the most bang for my buck,” Ariel laughs.  You could improve the sound somewhat by recording at double-speed… but the end result didn’t exactly sound like it hailed from the Record Plant.

The paradox of Worn Copy and the other Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti albums of this era is that Ariel was using a preliminary process to make a finished product, and further, that he was attempting to make music with the layered arrangements and intricate production of, say, Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, using technology even more basic than what was available to DIY pioneers like Swell Maps and Television Personalities (who at least got to see the inside of a professional recording studio).

This gulf between ambition and means is heard most gloriously on Worn Copy’s opener, “Trepanated Earth”, an 11-minute, multi-segmented epic that swerves through style switches and crescendo upon crescendo, resurrecting the bygone drama of a lost golden age of radio rock.  “ I feel like it’s being transmitted from my ears, being broadcast from 1979,” says Ariel. “Pomp and massiveness” was what he was aiming for, he says. That and a feeling of unhinged, off-the-rails momentum: “the nuance and the chemistry of a real band playing – a band at their prime or at their most unleashed, when they had all their energy stirred up and didn’t know what to do with it. In that song, I just wanted to do everything at once – a real showcase of what I can do.”

“Like all the stuff in a way, ‘Trepanated Earth’ is intended to catch someone off guard while they’re listening in a record store,” Ariel continues. He puts on a nerdy-dude voice to impersonate the startled customer: “’ Wooah, what is this, man! I’ve never heard this stuff before! What year is it’s from?’” He deadpans the clerk’s voice - “It’s from this year” – and then switches back to the customer’s stunned “What?!?” 

A former record store clerk himself, Ariel effortlessly breaks down the component stages of “Trepanated Earth”,  connecting each section in turn to the theme song of the TV sitcom ‘Full House,’ to the glassy guitar-chimes of English DIY cult figure Martin Newell of The Cleaners from Venus, to Can’s slippery bass-motion, to the raging guitar-thrash of Simply Saucer. But the whole transcends its parts, and the raging conglomerate is truly transcendent – possibly the most ecstatic rock blow-out of the 21^st Century so far. 

But what about that strange title?

“I looked it up in the dictionary but there’s no such word – there’s ‘trepanned’ but not ‘trepanated.. I just liked the way it rolled off the tongue.” Non-existent word or not, the title communicates a potent image: just like primitive peoples boring holes in the skulls of persons we’d  nowadays recognize as mentally ill, in order to release evil spirits,  you picture our planet being perforated and unloosing black flaming clouds of psychotic energy. It’s easy to imagine “Trepanated Earth” as an album cover – “a psychedelic explosion” as Ariel puts it.  

The song starts with Ariel’s guttural growls of misanthropy – “the human race is a pile of dogshit”, “mankind is a Nazi”, “humanity is the devil”, “do you really think I give a fuck about the world?” – offset by a boyish, innocent alter-ego Ariel speaking about dream worlds and the power of the imagination.  This is a devil versus angel shoulder scenario, Ariel explains. “They’re having a little dance, the two voices, the two viewpoints.” Then “Trepanated” shifts into a love-hate song. “It’s a schism between a couple – I’m just pleading, telling them I hate their guts while I love their ass. It’s a kiss-off that’s also like a love poem”.

“Immune To Emotion,” the next track on Worn Copy, is the calm after the storm of “Trepanated”. But the serenity is only surface-deep, a mask of impregnability. “That phrase just rolled off my tongue really easily – it’s what I would have liked to have seemed to everybody. I’m completely just bluffing. It’s a pose - ‘nothing’s going to ruffle this guy’ -  but of course inside I’m a screaming manlet who needs attention.”

“Life In LA” drops the bad-ass façade with the candid confession that “life can be so lonely”. The melancholy mood is softened by a daffy quacking refrain that recurs (Ariel vocally squawking melodic lines for his clarinetist friend to follow and double) and by a syrupy golden sound that oozes gorgeously over the entire song. “The wah pedal is introduced on Worn Copy – that’s the effect du jour on all the songs. It gives ‘Life in LA’  that sort of fake-funky feeling. An easy-listening, AM Gold vibe, like ‘Girlfriend;, that Paul McCartney song that Michael Jackson sang. I picture palm trees, light reflecting off of sun-blockers.” The mise en scene seems similar to Ariel’s later cover of the Sixties pop-psych song “Bright Lit Blue Skies” – where the summer sunshine feels like a lie to those exiled from happiness, who carry a cache of wintry coldness inside them all year round.

There are lighter moments scattered all across Worn Copy. Whimsies like “Jules Lost His Jewels”, the true story of Ariel’s cat getting neutered because he sprayed over his girlfriend’s leg. The jaunty “Artifact” -  a sort of sci-fi fable or message to his future-self sent via song, laced with water-bong sounds.  Bouncy comic cuts like “Credit,” with its hilarious lyrics about how the game is rigged against consumers, and “The Drummer”,  a third-person veiled-autobiography about “an anti-hero starting his own band,” who gets the chicks dancing to beats played “with his tongue and his teeth”.  “One On One” shimmers gorgeously like Can in Afro-mode, the dreaminess offset by a lyric about an orgy: “Take your neighbor’s hand / And throw them on the ground… Don’t fret if you’re going to come / When you’re finished, get another one.”  Starting with a sample from obscure German psych-prog outfit Missus Beastly, “Somewhere In Europe” is a spoof on Americans abroad that Ariel compares to Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. 

There are also pure moments of aching near-abstract beauty – the ambient caverns of “Foilly Foibles / GOLD”, a reverberant chamber redolent of Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly”, although Ariel’s own comparisons are Saucerful of Secrets and Cluster. Or “Jagged Carnival Tours”, which Ariel describes as “like some futuristic tunnel at Universal Studios in the Eighties”. This noodling amorphousness is something that Ariel used to jam out by the yard, or C120, reflecting his love of Sun Ra and ultra-obscure, beyond-the-Nurse-With-Wound-List experimental oddballs.

Still, the heart of the album, as with all of Ariel’s work, is the clash of opposed impulses: pop’s pleasing prettiness and shapely structures, stained and shook by the sort of wounded / wounding emotions that  normally funnel themselves into genres like death-metal, industrial and Goth.   

The literary critic Randall Jarrell believed that you could take any poet or writer’s work and boil it down to a handful of keywords that crystalize the kernel, the creative matrix, of their vision.  In Ariel’s case, way out in front, the hands-down winner, would be “perverted”. That word and variants like “pervert” and “perversion” crop up repeatedly in his conversation, serve as the go-to adjective to describe his approach to processing sound, warping influences, and writing lyrics, as well as his taste and his worldview.

“I think I’m a little bit perverted in my reasoning,” Ariel muses. “I flip things on their head and re-encrust the diamond with coal, if you get me. I pervert the meanings of things, I pervert the sacred. I profane things – but in a really G-rated way. I’m not the Marquis de Sade, I’m not even Genesis P-Orridge. But I’ve always been kind of morbid.  That’s why I love rock’n’roll -- it’s bad. When things are bad aesthetically as well as morally -- there lies my interest.”

Things starting going awry when Ariel was only two and his parents got divorced. He went through therapy as a kid. After a period at a Jewish private school, he attended a public junior high in Beverley Hills. The transition was difficult. “Being very small, I was made fun of a lot.” So Ariel got into death metal as a kind of retaliatory counter-strike.  “There’s no question I was trying to over-compensate for the fact that I was a little pipsqueak and completely harmless, by listening to really aggressive music. Embracing something to intimidate people.  I decided I had to get my revenge. I was like a Columbine kid, except this is before Columbine. But there was that total pathos thing of using the craziest music to express my extreme antipathy to normies. I wore Goreguts T shirts and I was like ‘why don’t people want to talk me?’!”

Things improved after a sojourn at an American private school in Mexico – the death-metal CDs were traded in for the less overtly offensive miserabilism of The Cure and The Smiths.  Still, a taste for the dark and perverted  manifested still through his high school artwork, which had a “a grotesque quality - corpses, sculptures I made of human flesh. Deep-gutted and disemboweled. All these terrible sadistic things happening to them, charged with erotic or religious imagery.”

 “Craft” is another Jarrell-style keyword that flickers through Ariel’s conversation, with a palpable pride in what he achieved on the most basic set-up. Listening, you can sense an innocent Lego-like delight in song building, the deftness with which he strings together intros, builds, middle-eights,  transitions, codas, into surprising but logical pop constructions.

Craftmanship is something that Ariel was praised for from a very early age, albeit in the visual rather than sonic arts: the first time he can remember receiving encouragement and attention. “From the age of three, I was an extremely skilled craftsman,” he told me in 2010. “I was always raised to think I was supposed to be an artist” – here he put on a squeaky old parent’s voice - “’Oh my god, look at him, he’s like a Picasso’. They thought I was going to go into graphic design.” But when he got to art school, he found that his particular talent for illustration was out of synch with prevailing conceptual approaches. That’s when the songwriting impulses of his pre-teen years resurged, resulting in his presentation of CD-Rs sold from a kiosk as his artistic contribution to the end-of-year thesis show at Cal Arts.  

In his songs,  two stages of Ariel’s development -  the child’s awakening to the rapture of pure pop beauty, the adolescent’s angst and bratty nihilism - mesh into art-pop that’s simultaneously classicist and expressionist.  The violence of emotion is what gives Ariel’s work its charge, flooding the formalist pop structures with raw feeling -  like the virulent hues of graffiti sprayed against the side of a building.