Half comic, half melancholic: an interview with Ariel Pink.

Ariel Pink is taking interviews today. We are allotted 20 minutes each. At the 18-minute mark, two beeps tell us to wrap it up. It is an artificial setting for a conversation, but Ariel speaks with his characteristic honesty and candour.

I know more about the man than I do his music. That is a telling sentence; an indictment, perhaps, of us all — Ariel, myself and the modern artistic arena.

Once, people bought records. This physical act and financial transaction fostered respect between artist and audience. That is, we were more likely to listen to an album in full, and they could maintain an income without delving too far into corporate waters. Today we Google, we stream. We don’t listen too hard and we are very rarely invested, in any sense of the word. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, we swallow headlines and rush opinions. And Ariel Pink elicits some strong headlines. He has been accused of everything from misogyny to racism. In his most recent controversy, he said that Madonna was on a “downward slide” and made a casual mention of the Queen of Pop gyrating and pretending to be twenty years old. Grimes called him a “delusional misogynist”, bloggers fulfilled their daily quota and while we all cried repulsion, Ariel Pink released his new album, pom pom.

Ariel is aware of the game he is a part of. He knows his sound bites will be used as fodder, for both the tabloids and the intellectuals. “I’m not going to double back and say that it’s not my fault. I’m completely aware that I’m just running my mouth,” he says. Is he mocking the process, I ask? “I’m perfectly happy to be the worst dude you could give them,” he says, though notes of bitterness betray this happiness. “It’s slightly amusing to hear scores of people try and slay me for being nobody.”

This is a recurring theme: being a nobody. This generation’s truest fear: not that their work is bad, but that it is unnoticed. “In order for me to survive [by] making music, I basically have to stick and around and do it, with my sensibility, with just enough of a work ethic, and without any kind of desperation to make it. I think that’s been long extinguished and I never really had it to begin with.”

When I ask about the ideas behind his latest video, for Put your Number in My Phone, he goes from talking about the director Grant Singer elevating “the sense of difference in everybody, the freak in everybody” to lamenting a society that turns their back on the elderly. “They’re really isolated and marooned on this island of futility, and we don’t care. We seem them as disposable, especially if they don’t have kids. So, what I like is that it [the video] shines a light on the loneliest of the individuals everywhere.”

“An island of futility”. Ariel talks like this, poetic with a side of dark humour. “People don’t care about people,” he states at one point. “They care about their pets. They don’t care about war.” I agree, but I wonder how we got here.

I ask him about the effects of his commercial success.

He replies that he has had none.

“Music itself has never bought me anything. It’s never made me any money… I haven’t had commercial success, actually. I’m just sort of a media phenomenon. I don’t have the sales to back it up. There’s no reason why I should be competing with Kanye on Pitchfork for ‘Best of 2010’ — I’ve got nothing to show for it. I can’t even buy a house, so that should tell you about the state of music right there, that’s where we’re at.”

He explains that he rents a “dust bowl” in Hyland Park, that he is “basically just working class” and doesn’t even own a computer. This is a man with an enduring musical career taking interviews for his tenth studio album. I feel guilty for every illegal download. It’s a strange world. Kim Kardashian earns millions but Ariel Pink can’t make a living from his music?

I ask if the magic is still there, in the creative process, noting that he said in a recent interview that music had lost its therapeutic value.

“I see my livelihood as being music; that’s how I pay my rent, so it is a job, that’s just a fact of growing up. That’s not music’s fault. It’s music’s fault for giving people hopes and dreams and all that kind of stuff when there’s really none of that in the real world. While most people kind of grow up, and realise that grim reality, perk up and move on, I on the other hand, stuck around a little bit longer.”

I think about deleting Spotify; I think about Pharrell making less than $3,000 on that horribly ubiquitous song Happy. It was played four million times. I think about how unsustainable that is for young artists. I decide to stop thinking, to turn on pom pom, letting Ariel speak in his chosen medium. I encourage you to do so, too.

“The kids decide what is going to be listened to, what they like. As long as the kids decide, I somehow feel like I have an ally and I’m a little bit more poised to last, with me as their lobbyist.