Ariel Pink May Not Be The Intellectual Gramsci Envisioned…
But he’s the intellectual we need.
“welcome to the panoptigan. they wasted no time…save yourselves friends, cancel me now and turn me in before they come for you.”
On January 7, 2021, Ariel Rosenberg (a.k.a Ariel Pink) waved the white flag on Twitter, accepting– for the time being– the terms of his defeat. That conspicuous date is not a coincidence; your guesses are probably in the right ballpark. No, he didn’t storm the Capitol, but he did attend the Stop the Steal Rally, preluding the infamous insurrection. What followed was, in some ways, typical and unremarkable: he was scorned by fans, dropped from his label, and functionally blacklisted. We’ve all read this story before. We all have our personal Ariel Pink. But his cancellation, in particular, exposes a collective atrophy of critical thinking skills, an inability to wrestle with two conflicting ideas– and I’m hearing echoes of Antonio Gramsci.
The musician is a bastion of controversy and contrarianism; even musically, he’s awkward and unlikable. Whether or not it was lauded, Ariel Pink’s sound has always been distinctive and defiant, and he found an audience of misfit toys in the early 2000s in LA. There was no archetypal Ariel Pink fan– they were weirdos, dad rockers, goths, etc., but each had an appreciation that he was doing something extremely unique. In an interview for Tablet, Pink described his own sound as a “wishy-washy machine organ-pump sound that’s out in the stratosphere. There’s no instrument that can make it. It’s this undulating, organic machine-like thing.” This beautifully incoherent description quite accurately describes his music, which oscillates between profound and obscene, carried through perfect melodies and harsh dirges.
While he may not have been a household name, he still earned the admiration of giants in his milieu. Four consecutive albums earned a spot on Pitchfork’s Best New Music list. They all cracked the Billboard 200. Frontman of the Strokes, Julian Casablancas, sang his praises in an interview with Vulture: “Today someone like Ariel Pink is relatively unknown. I think Ariel Pink will be one of the best-remembered artists of this generation and now nobody in the mainstream knows him,” continuing later, “I strive to build a world where… Ariel Pink is as popular as Ed Sheeran.” Ariel Pink was never for everyone, but he was talented enough that his awkward weirdo shrouding didn’t preclude him from being accepted by the industry. That, itself, is an anomaly; and that’s what made his cancellation so devastating to persistent fans.
Despite his public bludgeoning in 2021, Ariel Pink didn’t go down without a fight– at least, musically. Though he was dropped from his label in the days following the 6th, he has since released numerous demos, tracks, and full-length albums on his Substack, Blissful Wizard, some of which also appear on Spotify. On October 5, 2022, Pink released a hour long pseudo-album called “Never Made a Demo Ever,” where he addresses his cancellation for the first time in song. The first track that plays, “Cancelled!” is the more reactive, emotional response; but the true hidden gem on that album comes at minute 48.
No Stars Left (in Hollywood) serves as a poignant autobiography of Pink’s previous year and a half and offers succinct commentary on contemporary cancel culture. The lyrics lament the fallen cultural production capital of the US, finding no kinship with its population nor ideology. Through characteristic Ariel Pink sneers, the first verse navigates the all-too clichéd rollercoaster of hope and despair native to Los Angeles. The narrator’s perspective in the song begins curious: “What’s a girl like you thinking walking alone on this side of town? You sure do look like you got something dirty up your sleeve, well let’s see you show me.” And ends vicious: “You sound so self-obsessed, you look like a bat out of hell, well I’m getting the hell out of here.”
The track initially intrigues its listener with what can be read as an allegory. Los Angeles, here, is the girl, initially thought to be sympathetic to freaks and depravity. Upon closer inspection, however, her ugliness shows itself not as impurity or perversion, but as vanity. The lascivious crowd that offsets glitzy Hollywood glamor has been run off by solipsists. Los Angeles has always been populated with beautiful morons, but in these lyrics, Pink captures the feeling of loss– loss of the grimy nonconformists that can only exist in contrast to the established LA culture. Following the first verse, Pink croons through multiple levels of distortion: “one path leads to certain destruction, the other one leads straight to the castle.”
Delivered through that undulating, organ-pump sound, this is Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony plainly stated. In Hollywood, there exists a right answer, a right opinion, a right career, and Pink finds himself wrong– potentially on all fronts. No Stars Left (in Hollywood) asserts itself as the epitaph for a true alternative and thrusts Gramsci’s verbose theory on hegemony into the 21st century.
As fascism was taking a foothold in Europe, the intellectual descendants of Marx began to wonder why their revolution hadn’t yet come. Why were the people so accepting of such poor circumstances and inequality? Why hadn’t they taken up arms against the bourgeoisie? Antonio Gramsci, however, had a different perspective. While the devout Marxists were so concerned about the praxis of the Popular Manual– or the sensationalist rise of the proletariat– Gramsci knew that the power of the dominant class was most effective in their ability to assert cultural hegemony. He, thus, devoted himself to the question of how the current norms and taboos exist to reinforce themselves. To what extent do the people acknowledge the culture as a determined set of norms and taboos, or as fixed and indeterminable?
The dominant class stipulates the orthodoxy and remains in power by convincing the people that it’s just the way things are, or that these norms exist because they are unequivocally right and just. In other words, hegemonic power presents its ideology as a hurricane. Any objection to the dominant standard is as futile as trying to fight the weather. To ensure the masses stay pacified, the presiding authority produces a cadre of intellectuals who purvey placation and rapprochement to the people (i.e. the Blue Pill):
The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, ‘mediated’ by the whole fabric of society as by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are precisely, the ‘functionaries’ (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 16).
From Gramsci’s perspective, culture is determined by a “complex of superstructures,” and the intellectuals serve as mere vessels to assimilate their party’s regnant doctrine into common beliefs and practices. Ultimately, the logic of hegemony follows as such: what we understand to be “the way things are” is, in fact, a series of specified norms and taboos determined by the dominant class– whether or not they directly reference class or politics.
Hence, the bridge in No Stars Left (in Hollywood): “one path leads to certain destruction, the other one leads straight to the castle.” Ariel Pink’s proverbial “castle” is the manifestation of the dominant power in society. Both Gramsci and Pink are saying the same thing here: fall in line or fall out of favor. For public figures, mainstream success requires them “to elaborate” on their industry’s “own component parts” (16). Acquiesce to the party line, or face “certain destruction.” There is no room to seriously question the preponderant structures– that is if you want to enjoy the status of an intellectual.
It’s worth noting that the elaboration of intellectual strata in concrete reality does not take place on the terrain of abstract democracy but in accordance with very concrete traditional historical processes. Strata have grown up which traditionally ‘produce’ intellectuals and these strata coincide with those which have specialised in ‘saving’, i.e. the petty and middle landed bourgeoisie and certain strata of the petty and middle urban bourgeoisie (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 11).
Under Gramsci’s circumstances, the production of intellectuals by a despotic regime was deliberate and specific. Though we are closer to a more organic formation of an intellectual cadre, the terms and conditions remain the same. Public figures today aren’t just academics, writers, and politicians; the distinction of intellectual is obfuscated by the growing number of artists, musicians, and even influencers who are increasingly being called upon to “take a stance.” They may look different and express ideology differently, but the same logic follows. Political intellectuals are beholden to their party the same way that musicians are beholden to their label, or that influencers are beholden to their brand sponsors.
This is why “cancellation” can occur. When public intellectuals refuse to uphold the traditional processes of “saving” the bourgeoisie, they risk losing industry support– which today is synonymous with the hegemonic authority. You might be thinking that this is an oversimplification– that there are plenty of celebrities who “speak up” against injustice or abuses of power. In such cases, however, the foundational network of power remains obscured. These nominal denouncians refer only to some specific elaboration of hegemonic power, never the structures themselves. The dominant regime can always recover from a Donald Trump or a Harvey Weinstein being ousted from power, as long as they can replace him with someone equally interested in preserving industry dominion. Conversely, any demonstration that disrupts the prevailing codification of class, politics, and society breaks the tacit contract between intellectual and hegemonic power. That’s why Ariel Pink is different.
Ariel Pink was always known as a provocateur; his former guitarist deemed him “a world-class contrarian.” He was tolerated by the industry when he could toe the line between indie darling and true weirdo; but for someone so averse to mainstream anything, there’s always an expiration date. He was a terrible intellectual– in the traditional sense. Instead of “elaborating on the component parts” of the music industry, he exposed them for what they are. The second verse of No Stars takes a personal turn. He sings:
I don’t get my thrills putting other people down, like some high school apparition. But you set up shop in my hometown and accused me of predation.
I got sick of all those New York City hipsters, so I left LA. But that Staten Island dump, that New York City sewer, can’t wash that stink away.
Evidently, Ariel Pink is referencing his own cancellation in this verse. Fans speculate in the Youtube comments (rather convincingly) that “those New York City hipsters” allude to the executives at Mexican Summer, Pink’s former music label based in Brooklyn, New York. Naturally, the tone is scornful, but he doesn’t seek to “own the libs.” Rather, he points directly to the authority figure that codifies what’s acceptable from an artist. This choice and distinction from Pink reframes some of his adversarial prattle as meaningful critical thought. He remarked in an interview with Tablet:
Artists are slaves. They’re stupid. They think they have their own agency, but they’re very naive. They’re perfect vectors for influencing people, and they’re very influenceable.
Yes, it’s contrarian. Yes, it’s antagonistic. But it’s also Gramsci.
Pink distinguishes himself from the pack with this hyper-awareness of cultural constitutions. He’s smart enough to recognize the hegemonic underbelly of the industry, rather than take his anger out symbolically– like on a smattering of Bud Light. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, that’s also what’s precluded him from being adopted by the right wing culture industry. His iconoclastic, gender-bending presence doesn’t exactly blend in with “conservative values;” though, they’ve tried. In January 2021, he gave a deliciously awkward interview with Tucker Carlson, that likely shattered any chance of Pink’s mainstream acceptance on the right.
This compulsive resistance to any coherent ideology–left or right– is why Ariel Pink finds himself releasing new music through his own label and on Substack. However, it’s also what makes him an ideal intellectual for our time. Though Gramsci was a socialist, his ideal society was not one where socialism replaced fascism or capitalism as the hegemonic power in the traditional sense. Instead, he envisioned a heterogenous, adaptable culture that necessitates
“the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself… becomes the foundation a new and integral conception of the world” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 9).
Gramsci envisioned an equilibrium where corporations shift their interests away from profit and earnings toward values more synonymous with those of the people. Of course, that hasn’t happened yet, and it shows no signs of materializing so long as our cultural spokespeople adhere to the traditional political and economic stratifications set by the dominant force in society. Ariel Pink offered a glimmer of hope– not because he has really good politics or articulated a new revolutionary cultural theory– but because he asked his fans to grapple with two contradictory ideas: liking his music and hating his politics.
The truth is, it’s hard to blame fans for such a disappointing reaction given the current configuration of the culture industry. The production and distribution of music must factionalize the masses into hierarchies of taste and morality. Taylor Swift is lowbrow; but if you don’t support her, that’s internalized sexism. To be discouraged by modern circumstances, according to Raymond Williams, would be perfectly natural:
Nothing has done more to sour the democratic idea [of culture], among its natural supported, and to drive them back into an angry self-exile, than the plain, overwhelming cultural issues: the apparent division of our culture into, on the one hand, a remote and self-gracious sophistication, on the other hand, a doped mass (Culture is Ordinary, 17).
What may have started as “angry self-exile” for Ariel Pink, however, might have been a blessing in disguise. Hollywood blacklisting forced him to self-release his music on his Substack, allowing the freedom to release what he wants when he wants. Fans directly fund the artist via a month-to-month subscription model, rather than an abysmal $0.003-$0.005 per stream– before the label takes their cut. This underground market isn’t new, however. Following the 2017 cancellation of Louis CK, he began selling his specials and sit com episodes directly to consumers on his personal website at a fraction of the cost on iTunes.
This is not to say that it’s necessarily advantageous or rewarding to be dropped from a label or streaming service. The loss of industry-backed distributing and marketing can be detrimental to an artist– and usually is. It requires the artist to have an established fanbase and the personal means to produce their art. However, this adaptation in the direction of personal subscription models offers some reassurance that a Gramsci-esque equilibrium is still possible, though we must first consider a labor theory of culture.
Working in the tradition of Marx and Gramsci, Michael Denning outlines the demand and framework for a labor theory of culture:
A labor theory of culture can take us beyond the noisy sphere of the market in the analysis of mass culture, reminding us that the apparent confrontation between cultural commodities and cultural consumer obscures the laborers in the culture industry (Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 94).
Let’s, for a minute, consider cultural producers as laborers– no different than factory workers, telemarketers, or salesmen. While it may seem sterile and much less fun, it may be our best way around the menacing cultural hegemon. The contemporary culture industry turns us into fetishists– transforming cultural products like movies, music (or the performing personas behind them) into untouchable dieties that shape our values and politics. To resist that is to see acting or songwriting as a labor, untethered to our ego or place in society. Platforms like Substack and Patreon can serve as reformed market places, overcoming the sensationalist tendencies of the current Hollywood apparatus. Consumers send money directly to the producers, enjoying their content without falling into the ideological trappings of mass marketing.
Until this is the case, considering Ariel Pink as an intellectual is a good exercise for leftist indie lovers. Practice listening to and appreciating his songs knowing he’s a Trump supporter, without letting that obfuscate his musical merits. Or better yet– don’t; there is no need grapple with Ariel Rosenberg’s politics because they are wholly separate from Ariel Pink’s music as cultural labor product. There might be some growing pains in overcoming such seemingly moral expressions of cultural hegemony, but with any luck, we’ll see a world where there are no stars left in Hollywood.
