The Thousands

Listening to Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti is like hearing a room full of hyperactive nine year olds playing pop hits of the 60s and 70s from memory on kazoos and toy drums.

Originally a home-recording pseudonym for Ariel Rosenberg, earlier works by APHG were imaginatively low-fi (drum beats made by mouth?!?), shrouded in tape hiss, with stumbling arrangements, lovingly off-key vocals, and hilarious, surreal lyrics.

Before Today is Rosenberg’s first full-length for a larger indie label – and, not coincidentally, his first recorded in a proper studio. It sacrifices none of the great songwriting and madcap fun of previous releases. And while it’s not as mysterious and cool, frankly? It’s much easier to recommend. This isn’t just a party for lo-fi aesthetes anymore. Everyone’s invited.

Wilfred Brandt: I lived in Los Angeles for about 4 years; I know you were born and raised there. I found it really awesome and interesting and fascinating and unusual. But I’ve also found that people have really strong feelings about Los Angeles or people from Los Angeles, either positive or negative – sometimes if they’ve never even been there. How do you react to people’s weird prejudices both for and against Los Angeles?

Ariel Pink: That’s like the perfect question for me; I could extrapolate for days. My theory is that, we pretty much invented TV, the mechanism of exchange that would just grip our world… And the experiment of television, in the beginning, it had to have a city. Los Angeles is founded ON that. The whole reason all the property was bought up was for the motion picture industry. I’m thinking, they decided to kill two birds with one stone; since L.A. was going to be where they would film everything and where the actors would live, and where all that stuff would HAPPEN, they just decided to make it a reality show; so they turned the camera on to the set, and the city became the set. So everybody KNOWS Beverly Hills, and everybody KNOWS Los Angeles and Hollywood around the world.

What would stop the whole world from coming here? I don’t know! They probably come out here and don’t like it because… being a big fish in a small pond is one thing. But it’s really hard to get noticed in a city full of people who are trying to get noticed and not even admitting it to themselves all the while. So, I think it’s a really interesting place. It’s a city that’s made for a certain temperament, and anybody who does live here should really dig the history because it really is, in my opinion, the pulse of the 20th century and the whole reason that we’re all here right now.

WB: I found it interesting that, unlike other cities where I had lived, that might have like a placard where anything [historical] happened, when you live in L.A. you might find out, ‘oh, Charlie Chaplin lived in the house down the street’. So much stuff has happened, and there’s been such a high turnover of all these amazing, talented people and things, that its not even like, put on the map?
AP: Right! It doesn’t have its own reality, it’s not in the narrative. In order to be a part of the narrative, you’re supposed to come from your little village in Croatia, make it all the way down to L.A. so you can get your reality show about your biography about your triumph against all odds in the city. That’s everybody’s fucking biography man. We have the patent on anybody – anybody who gets grinded through the mill gets their fucking biography. But it has to have all the hallmarks of a real story. It has to be a coming of age, grabbing yourself by the bootstraps kind of deal.Because there’s really nothing all that blue collar about prostituting yourself and your image for kicks in the world.

WB: I did some work in television, and I found out that a lot of game shows and stuff they’d have people on and they’d be like, ‘this is Jed – he’s from Iowa’. But really Jed would be an actor who moved from Iowa six years. But it’s like what you’re saying, they can’t use the story that he’s an actor who lives on Melrose, they have to be like ‘he’s from Iowa!’
AP: He has to be from Iowa because when he makes it into whatever movie he’s going to be in, the only way for him to be a commodity as far as a personality is concerned, the only way for anybody to take an interest in HIS life is to make HIS life the story – it has to BE a story, there has to be a story. So the narratives that you get are pretty much all the same, in every walk of life in the industry. I mean music? [This town is] like the Behind The Music studio, y’know? Like everybody’s REAL life, the REAL actor they’re playing. I think it’s so insidious that everybody’s convinced themselves that they’re like these things that are worth anybody’s two cents. Of course, they’re right, but I think it’s like, everybody deserves it. The people I think that don’t get into that are probably making a very, very definite statement about certain aspects of capitalism.

WB: Because this record’s getting a bigger release and getting more attention, do you feel an obligation to fulfill people’s weird narrative that they have about Ariel Pink?
AP: Oh no! I’m inspired by destroying any notions that they have. I feel more infused with a sense of purpose than I ever did. I really got to the point where there was no reason for me to do it anymore. Because I felt like it was just… that’s it, y’know. Now people know my name – I must be doing something wrong.
(laughs)
AP: And now I’m just starting to understand that it’s kind of a luxury to have attention.

WB: To me, your music works on a couple levels. I can tell that you’ve obviously got a love for pop music and pop songs and songwriting. The way your music comes out, its like a tribute to that, but its also sort of sped up and regurgitated in this hyper-realistic style. And its almost like you’re having fun with the fact – and acknowledging that – pop music is a construct? And it’s not like a sort of a primitive expression of emotion anymore. Would you agree?
AP: Yeah yeah. All the stuff that we hear nowadays, dripping with emotion and sincerity – its all a fucking joke, man. I mean for me, this is Broadway, this is like, ‘I’m takin’ it to New Yawk!’ (both laugh) It’s added pizzazz.

WB: Its sort of like, ‘if you sing the song this way, it means you’re sad’ and ‘if you sing the note this way, it means you’re happy’ and it doesn’t necessarily mean that REALLY anymore.
AP: It’s supposed to make people feel sad, feel good, feel ALL the things that music is supposed to do without you even trying to figure it out. If there’s more stuff to it? If the pictures get you off? Then that’s great man. I’d like to infuse a little bit more of that into this kind of 2-dimensional, flat-screen iTunes, postmodern music experience that we have going on right now. The kids need it man. I’m preserving something that I think is very soon going to be extinct.
WB: Well the dialogue going on between pop music and the audience nowadays is pretty routine.
AP: It’s scary!

I think recordings are going to go out, man. Future generations are not going to have the attention span, they’re not going to even care about recordings. We have cared about it for the past 50 years, we think its like, ‘oh yeah, there’s a cycle, as soon as we get a new medium we can like, kickstart this career, and we can have ‘The Beatles’ all over again’. No dude. It’s just this one moment, when we got the technology, and we just were like – WOW! We turned on the microphone, and we heard ourselves. ‘That really happened! Listen to THAT!!’ And we’re just getting off on it in three minute clumps, y’know? That’s the culmination of four hundred years of music and progress. It might just get snuffed out tomorrow, and the novelty of capturing photographs, movies, and recordings… I think it’s going to be too isolating for there to be much culture in it. I think it’s going to be much more about ‘live’ things. I think music is going to happen in a social way. Maybe it already is…

WB: And this will just be remembered as ‘the recording era’. ‘Remember that era where everything was recorded?’
AP: Right. Exactly! And we’ll probably still be trying to dig ourselves out of that hole, because we’ll have pretty much taken the short path to the finish line. And then we have to really contend with whether there’s a real history at all or if it’s a real crap shoot and you kind of just… The narrative changes, like, the players change as it goes and people make their own histories and all that kind of stuff.

WB: Well your music is a great tribute to the recording era.
AP: And itis a tribute! It’s just like a good old fashioned tribute, like a fucking jamboree, y’know? Like they had the town fair with Jefferson Airplane, y’know? And we don’t care – good times, rock and roll! It’s like pop art. It IS commentary, and it’s fun. It’s my life too, which is like, better than fiction.

WB: It was really great talking to you, thank you.
AP: Thanks man. Nice yapping at ya.