Story & Photos by Catie Keck
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti has been gaining increasing notoriety since the release of Before Today on 4AD last June. The avant-garde aesthetic of Ariel Pink’s psychedelic lo-fi pop first caught the attention of members of Animal Collective, who re-released Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums on their label Paw Tracks. Since then, Pink has collected a number of leading indie musicians who are now collectively known as his band Haunted Graffiti.
Infamous for his inherent honesty in both his music as well as interviews, Before Today transparently wrestles with some of Pink’s most personal insights, from his relationship with the media to his confusion about his own sexuality as it pertains to his gender identity. His lyrics borderline disturbing, but a consistent string of upbeat melodies and patient bass lines leave even the most unsettling of Pink’s lyrics feeling like an intimate look at his own insecurities.
While Ariel Pink has long been recognized as a major contributor to the development of the “chillwave” genre, his unique sound and blatant honesty have skyrocketed Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti to near mainstream fame. Before Today’s “Round and Round” topped charts for best tracks of 2010, and their popular video for the single was produced by Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. The band made their television debut Wednesday on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Catie Keck: During our previous interview, you referred to your relationship with The Flaming Lips [with whom you were touring during 2010] as a “mutual, but sincere ass-kissing.”
Ariel Pink: It was a new […] we weren’t used to that. We’re still not used to it. We’ve been playing a lot as a band, but up until The Flaming Lips, we’d never been on a tour that was that big. The whole uniqueness of the experience was something that was really different. Certain things became very clear and obvious. I don’t have that much experience going to huge rock concerts, so it was a really mind-blowing thing for me. I don’t know if that’s because they’re amazing or because I’ve been under a rock for so long. It instantly threw me down a whole different mind-space about what we could be doing, should be doing, and what needs to change.
We hadn’t even settled on a set list up until The Flaming Lips tour for the entire time we’ve been a band. That’s usually, you know, a given for most bands. We want variety in our lineup. Ultimately, it’s been really helpful. The simplicity of the music is what really caries an energy in that kind of situation. I was always up my own butthole about, “I want to stay on the freaky shit.” The most impenetrable songs to most people, except some hardcore Ariel Pink fans. We’re going to be playing halls. We do have to kind of cater to the situation. We have to play the hits, and play them as best we can and hone it until it’s like clockwork and we’re just walking through the set.
CK: You’ve mentioned in many of your interviews that you no longer feel the need to prove anything with your music. Has that been a result of success in your career, or something more personal?
AP: Are you saying I have had lots of success?
CK: Oh, yeah.
AP: You know, I agree with you. It’s so big for me that it’s, like, too big. For me, personally, for my rabbit hole of perspective that is my life, it’s like I’ve won the lottery. It’s like I’m the most famous person on the face of the planet. Fact is, I’m not. Most people don’t know me…the majority of people who are into music out there, who are actively doing music, and listening to music, and producing it, and the labels that are putting it out, and the people making money doing music and selling out audiences, they know of me or they might have heard of me, but they are not familiar with me at all. They don’t know.
The majority of the world does not know about me. I’ve had no financial success with my music per se. Sales have been dismal all my life. I have nothing to talk about. I answer my phone and run my mouth in interviews, so that makes me kind of have this weird disability. I play live 200 days out of the year, and I have barely any time to record or think about making new music because I have made the decision to skip it. Bigger bands eat it more. They don’t rely on their music to get them by. But I made that decision after the first paycheck I got from touring, and it’s like, “Oh, great. I can pay my rent. I’m fucking living the high life.” And for me, I was the most famous person on the face of the earth.
So there I go, trotting along, perfectly happy with what I got and in the meantime, I’m a total idiot. I’m an idiot. I have no idea how much I’m worth, or what a band is worth. I’m only too happy to be the fucking guy who just runs his mouth and laps up every little bit of attention he can get because he’s living in a dream world, and he doesn’t care. So, at a certain point when I kind of manned-up and got my band together and tight after years of just going on the road and not taking it seriously, and doing as an exercise and a means to an end so I could pay my bills […] The whole thing is just me trying to be a little more intelligent in my own life. Really where my priorities are nowadays is like, this is a fucking little baby I made, and I owe it to the guys in my band and all they’re effort to make it something bigger. It makes me feel like I’m doing something positive. I love it.
CK: You’re very honest in your answers.
AP: I’m an honest person. You’re surrounded by idiots. There are no role models out there. Everybody that does rock and roll, they read it from the book of Rolling Stones. Everybody listens to too much Rolling Stones, and they think that the way to be a rock star is to have this kind of cool air of elusiveness. If it’s not me saying something interesting, I hope somebody out there is saying something a little bit more interesting. The music world is so fucking boring, I can’t even fucking stand it. That’s the only reason why people are paying attention to me if anything. My competition is shit. There’s so much good music in the world, there’s no competition. I’m trying to give hope to the next generation.
CK: Menopause Man has attracted a lot of attention for the oddity of its lyrics (“Rape me, castrate me, make me gay.”). You’ve said before it reflects on your own gender identity.
AP: It’s my own sense of feeling emasculated. I feel emasculated as a grown man. I look like a little hobbit boy. I feel beautiful sometimes as a girl. You know what I’m saying? Everybody wants to be attractive, so I’ve shifted my vain self. It’s not in my manhood, in my appearances. It’s in femininity. I think ultimately it just reflects on my sense that I’m an emasculated man.
If I had the choice, I’d love to be a woman so that I could have babies. I’d have lots and lots of babies because that’s the only thing that’s been keeping the world going up until now. Men keep civilization together a little bit, but they’ve been in a world of make-believe. They want to leave a legacy, but they’re just afraid of their own mortality because they ultimately can’t produce. […] No woman could fantasize about doing anything special in her life. The only thing she could fucking do is give the future. She might give it out of spite, she might give it for any reason, but that was her birthright. If you guys [women] all decided one year that this world is just not good enough—that the men that you’ve given birth to are too sad even for their own mothers to love them—you guys could stop the whole thing in one generation.
All you need is one man to impregnate all of you. You don’t need to fuck every fucking bro that comes around. You guys can have standards for who you sleep with. Women are tortured artists. They’re so battered that they grow to have a feeling of empathy, sympathy, and love for even the ugly ducklings […] If you wanted to kill all of your baby boys, and give birth to baby girls, you guys could keep the whole thing going. Keep one good cock, but chop his head off and stick it up on the wall. I think we’d be making some real progress. [Laughs.] Just imagine this, imagine this. Just a thought.

Gallery • 7 Photos

Ariel Pink, Living the High Life