Ariel Pink, the famously unfiltered L.A.-based purveyor of eccentric, ironic indie pop, has been in rare form of late. Advance tracks from his new record, “Pom Pom,” which came out yesterday on 4AD, have been well received, as have his live shows, two ingenious Grant Singer-directed music videos and a visit to Staten Island’s pint-size PS22 Chorus. But Pink has also managed to upset feminists, Eurythmics fans and supporters of late-period Madonna (including Grimes), thanks to choice remarks in interviews. If there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then “Pom Pom” is the album of the year.
What’s certain about the LP is that it’s a delightful, typically schizophrenic collection: wickedly dark and funny one moment, sweet and sentimental the next, and at other times as gleefully unhinged as Pink has ever been. The man born Ariel Rosenberg has also decided to embrace his adopted stage name like never before: pink album cover, pink lipstick in the “Put Your Number in My Phone” video, pink background for his performance in “Picture Me Gone” and, at a record release event on Monday, an appearance by a woman synonymous with the color: the outré Hollywood billboard queen Angelyne. “Who knows, maybe I will collaborate with Pink, too,” he says.
As with so many aspects of life and his work, Ariel Pink has a conflicted relationship with style. He’s worn flannel on stage, but has also been known to rock a glam, blousey silver top. Striped tees and jeans here; teased-out hair, makeup and spiky purple platforms there — both musically and sartorially, you never know quite what you’re going to get with Pink.
Start experimenting early.
“The early pictures of me you see online, in just T-shirts and hoodies — I’m still that guy with the hoodie. But what you don’t get to see in most of those pics is that I had these red clogs on that had, like, eyeballs on the ends of them that I drew on. That speaks a little bit more to what I was going after, stylistically. Even though my whole thing is kind of ironic, I really do believe in good style. And as much as I would like to claim otherwise and say that I don’t pay attention to those things, I am so vain. I mean, I’m from L.A.; I can’t deny it.”
Don’t overthink it.
“If I have good style — and I don’t know if I do — it just has to happen. I can’t think about it so much. It’s kind of the way I write my lyrics — I get into trouble if I try to compose something. It helps if I have somebody that has style to sort of give me some pointers and tell me what to wear. Otherwise, I’ll be wearing what I’m wearing right now, which is these yellow ‘Beetlejuice’ pedal pushers, and then a cardigan kind of thing on top of a dress shirt, not tucked in. It’s all kind of shaggy and secondhand. But there’s something that makes it personal, I suppose.”
It may not always be “masculine,” but it’s not drag.
“If I don’t feel like Prince, I feel like JT LeRoy or something. I look suspicious if I dress in sort of benign clothes, going to the airport. I think people are going to suspect that I have drugs in my pocket. I’m better off wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt. It’s probably one of those defense things where my identity is so entrenched in appearances, how I’ve never really felt like a man. So maybe that’s part of the gender-bending thing. Maybe I inch closer to the estrogen side, and it gets mistaken for style. I am just a guy, a heterosexual guy, but at the same time I’ve got this very queer sensibility that I’ve just been endowed with. And maybe it comes across as being mismatched in my more recent years. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t really know how I come across at all and I’ve kind of thrown up my hands. I just kind of leave it to the blogs or whoever, to the kids, to write it off as being probably like ‘throwback hipster chic,’ which I guess I sort of patented, inadvertently.”
No caps, no suits.
“I probably would never be caught wearing a baseball cap. Hats are difficult to me because they tend to be too big for my head. They don’t fit right and I feel ridiculous. But you’re even less likely to see me in a well-fitting, three-piece suit, looking dapper and handsome.”
Sometimes the best item of clothing belongs to someone else.
“The jacket that I wore in the ‘Put Your Number in My Phone’ video was discarded here at my house. A friend of a friend had given their jacket to a friend of mine. He had taken it off while he was at my house and forgotten it here. I had never worn it before. And then later on, the person who owned it saw it in the video, and in short order came and picked it up. That’s like so many things that sort of appear in my house. I don’t keep track of these things. I’m so unmaterialistic in every way. If you saw my apartment it would explain a lot, I think. It’s not so much a mess, but it just needs to have some feng shui, or a real ‘Queer Eye’ makeover or whatever.”
Accept that grooming is a mystery.
“Part of me is like, ‘Oh stop looking like a girl, Ariel. You should grow a beard or something.’ I’ve never grown a beard. I only allowed myself to grow a mustache once, and it’s an odd thing, because it felt so strange to me at the time, to think that people actually, like, groom themselves. And they do it in every possible way: They trim their nose hairs and stuff like that. That’s what that felt like to me, like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m actually sculpting something on my face? This is too much intention.’ I do everything in my power to not think about hair, and appearances. That’s how you get it long in the first place, is just by not dealing with that. Low maintenance. It’s more like Rasputin or something like that. If I was left alone, I would probably be living in a shack out in the forest. Like the Unabomber, with red clogs.”
This interview has been condensed and edited.
