Hypnogogic Hollywood:
Some words on Ariel Pink’s Dedicated to Bobby Jameson
Famously on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label before going major-minor with 4AD, Pink and now Mexican Summer…[insert blah about L.A.]…cult of personality…[without him no Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, Neon Indian, et al.]. What is hypnogogic pop? Good question, the thing being a lot of people credit Pink with it — first of the indie boys in their bedrooms tweaking nobs. Pastiche artist/freak/boho/weirdo/solipsist/pick one? — [half-ass Frank Zappa comparisons…Ween? Maybe not so much. Certainly funny.] Provocateur? Of course. Serious? Maybe. BUT IS IT POP MUSIC? BUT CAN YOU DANCE TO IT? And after all is that the point and if not, where does the point come in? Apologies, really, reader, apologies, there’s just so damn much to unpack and the more we unpack the more Ariel laughs so let’s not waste time…
Know him or not, Pink has been a considerable influence. His scuzz recordings roughly predate the modern bedroom phenomes. Yet never quite in the vein with which I associate them. Pink’s projects have always played as strange pop scrapbooks and his (sometimes literally) warped version of 60s/70s/80s pop has become a de facto mode of music-making for a whole generation of musicians.
The kicker here is that that which Ariel has always seemed most ambivalent about — sincerity — is exactly what we have taken as our tentpole. If you listen to the gamut of bedroom artists trafficking in a hazy kind of nostalgia (from Mac Demarco to Toro Y Moi, to more forward-looking iterations like Jay Som or Japanese Breakfast), you’ll hopefully note that the key is in their pop music as expression of the twin poles of bliss and melancholy — something that Pink has always chafed against, despite indulging in it from time to time. Arguably, that’s what makes their music more vital than Pink’s and it has often served as a way, especially for hetero men (having much less to say of interest to the average indie fan, who is increasingly queer and femme) to play to their strengths without ostensibly getting in the way of the general cultural tide. One could write tomes on the increasing focus of indie-music-making men (with exceptions) towards solitary, obsessive nostalgia, nicely juxtaposed against the ascension of women to a domination of traditional indie rock formations.
All that aside, my problem with Pink has always been what I take to be an inherent suspicion of pop music’s gravitational force. Which is wise, for all I know. At least the balance between pop and kitsch was essentially perfected on 2010’s Before Today, which sounded like an instant classic and still pretty much does. 2012’s Mature Themes was a worthy sequel but his inclination towards fuckery left some songs, well…frazzled is a good word. On both albums the most sublime moments (“Only in my Dreams,” “Round and Round”) were those which observed careful pastiche yet with the intention of celebration, not subversion. It’s a more complicated cocktail, after all: the hip postmodernist implores that there is no such thing as real but the student of history knows there is at least real enough.
I confess that my patience with Pink had waned since 2014’s Pom Pom, which was somewhat bloated, grungy, often unlistenable. It was a scrambled, coked-up trip across Pink’s alternate-history L.A. and was often far too hard to keep track of, which would’ve been of some interest if it hadn’t seemed so willfully designed to mock the listener. Perhaps my memory of it is obscured: I remember mostly frustration. Not because I didn’t get it but because it seemed Pink didn’t want me to.
All that to say I approached the new record with some trepidation. Such a gremlin is Pink at this point that I admit to some fundamental indifference towards his antics. I started Dedicated to Bobby Jameson fully three different times before I could wade past the first few songs. I shoved my headphones in, tried to open my ears a little more but lord, it seemed rote — same old Ariel, same old kink. Then a funny thing happened.
Usually — if one has any real sense — one understands that enlightenment isn’t all “Aha!” moments and lightbulbs above the head. It’s an arduous thing, full of slow reconstructions and lengthy revelations. It’s a time-consuming monster and it doesn’t help you so much as you fight it. But once in a while there comes a no-joke bolt out of the blue. Mine happened five songs in, bouncing along with the title track, Ariel’s eulogy for “the mayor of the Sunset Strip,” a decidedly Pink-ian tale featuring sardonic “Hey!”s in the chorus and a silly little organ riff. Only then the organ was beginning to morph into a familiar two-chord vamp with the bass, and a guitar emerged with a microscopically specific tone…
I giggled out loud. In the midst of a story of a lost cult musician in the Hollywood Hills, was, of all things, The Doors’ eternally-undead “Light My Fire,” wiggling its way through — not quite parody, not quite cover, but in some meta-place so delicious and funny, so right. It was not just a laugh of recognition, it was a laugh of real fun. Ariel had thoroughly flummoxed my cynicism. And not as a gremlin but as an honest jester. There’s something almost noble about that.
Needless to say, it flipped me on my ear and blessedly the rest of the album played to that ear with a kind of warmth and dare I say sincerity, which kept me lazily content until the end. The hooks on songs like “Time to Live,” “I Wanna Be Young,” or “Bubblegum Dreams,” carry that old stamp of his best: simultaneously referential and worthy of the music referenced. Seriously big hooks, that is to say, and some of his purest pop, focused and real. It was still Pink, of course, and was still full of goofs and self-destructing formulas. But stuff like “Dreamdate Narcissist” remains legitimately funny (not something said about most of “Pom Pom”), where “Feels Like Heaven” and “Do Yourself a Favor” operate with a wistfulness that is almost entirely new for him.
And then towering above them all is “Another Weekend,” which may be the most straightforward thing he’s ever written (even if it’s still coy). It’s his best outside of the immortal “Round and Round.” And, importantly, the two share that melancholic undercurrent that at last identifies Pink as something closer to human than conveniently smudgy character, something he seems to be growing more comfortable with. It was one of the best songs of the decade and the album was, surprisingly, one of the most mature.
I don’t know much about Bobby Jameson other than as Ariel’s tragic hero. Perhaps involving the life of a real person in his fictions gave Pink a new focus. I learned the other day that Pink’s real name is Ariel Rosenberg. Maybe we’ll get to meet him sometime soon.