Before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian assumed fame as a feudal right,
Angelyne
cruised Los Angeles in her flamingo pink Corvette. License plate:
ANGELNN. If her teased platinum wig or volleyball breasts led you to
mistake her for a pornographic Dolly Parton, her true identity could be
confirmed by the ubiquitous advertisements for herself that
she
purchased on billboards and bus shelters. Even though practically no one
could tell you what she did or had done, she became an '80s Southern
California fixture as iconic and purely ornamental as the palm trees—the
sunshine daydream to Elvira’s ghoulish noir. The tragedy is that she
peaked before Bravo. Without a reality show to channel the day-to-day
eccentricities of Angelyne and her candy-dyed Maltese, the O.G. avatar
of "famous for being famous" had to settle for a bit part in
Earth Girls Are Easy, a brief
gubernatorial run, and a self-released album on her Pink Kitten imprint.
In a city where
Mr. Incredible brawls with Batgirl while Chewbacca and Freddy Krueger vainly break it up,
Angelyne naturally still finds work in the meet-n-greet racket. Her
most recent appearance was yesterday at Origami Records in Echo Park, as
part of Ariel Pink’s "Tantalising [sic] Tinsel-Town Take Over." Should
you have missed the mass email, the promotional docket for Ariel Pink’s
latest schlock-opus
Pom Pom included "Delicious Donuts and
Delectable Ditties"; "Pretty in Pink. Permanently" (where "L.A.’s top
manicure artists" did nails in only pink); and the "Luxuriously 'L.A.'
Limo Listening Luau". The latter offered a "ride in style" to "enjoy
L.A.'s finest sites" in a "pink stretch job." RSVP did not guarantee
entrance.
It’s usually over-simplistic to extrapolate from a
marketing scheme, but in Ariel Pink as with Angelyne, the medium is the
message. The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately
"retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new
album, Pom Pom. By wheeling out the inflatable mummy of Angelyne,
the former Ariel Rosenberg wryly casts himself as her timeless prom
date in the Hollywood Babylon of conniving prophets, sexualized excess,
and sterling self-mythologizers.
A decade ago, Pink crept out
of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly,
self-destructing love songs. Issued on
Animal Collective’s
Paw Tracks imprint,
The Doldrums (and later
Worn Copy)
inspired chillwave and a lo-fi revival, as well as altering the
perception of L.A. as an indie-rock backwater. Pink was the sunshine and
noir dialect rolled into one, writing gorgeous heat-warped AM pop made
to soundtrack driving off of a cliff on Mulholland or save an animal
from drowning in a shimmering David Hockney swimming pool.
The
intervening years have seen him transform from wraith to wolf. The
romantic cult hero fantasies have given way to headlines that he’s the
"most hated man in indie rock."
The analog necessity of his early work has been replaced by studio
sheen, alienating those inclined towards the cassette hiss and rawness
of his first wave. Pink’s compared social media vilification to the
Rwandan genocide, dated porn stars,
called Grimes "stupid and retarded" and scored
a werewolf film—inevitably empathizing with the antagonist.
If
you hate Ariel Pink, nothing in this review can possibly alter your
opinion. You’ll scour the record for misogyny, say it’s too long, and
roll your eyes at the helium disco-grooves about getting white freckles
at the tanning salon and the amphetamine jingles for Jell-O. You think
he’s funny or you don’t. If you do, the best engagement is one of
suspended disbelief. After all, the CalArts alumnus remains the
stylistic next-of-kin to
Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them.
But
for all the arch humor and affectation, Pink writes some of most
wistful and peculiarly moving songs in contemporary music. "Put Your
Number in My Phone" feels like David Crosby covering
2Pac’s "What’z Ya Phone #".
Despite the '60s Sunset Strip jangle, the terrain shifts to the
Eastside, a Silver Lake taco truck where Pink sweetly begs for the
chance to get to know a girl better, before promptly blowing her
off—which we hear in uncomfortably
Drake-ian
Voicemail detail. It’s the paradox at the heart of the collection and
what ultimately makes it so compelling. Beyond catchy melodies, there’s a
constant agitation between Pink’s moonlit dreams and everyday
pessimism. He wants to be the romantic lover of fiction, but turns out
to be just another undependable disappointment—but at least he admits
it.
There’s "Sexual Athletics", where the sleazoid of the first
half makes preposterous pull-your-dick-out boasts about being the "Sex
King on a velvet swing/ Waiting for my Alice in Wonderland." The coda
descends into lo-fi clatter and a tender, Four Seasons-falsetto about
his life-long desire for a girlfriend. The ironic shell is always there,
lest you get too close to treating the songs like journal entries, but
the emotions remain conflicted and unconcealed.
If 2012’s
Mature Themes found him recovering from a break-up by concocting
Kinski Assassin Who Shagged Me daydreams during hungover wanderings to the Highland Park Wienerschnitzel,
Pom Pom
is Pink on the prowl—with its attendant sexploits and screwups.
Sometimes, the tales are in villainous character. "Four Shadows" recasts
Station to Station-era David Bowie
as a comically morbid goth. "Black Ballerina" chronicles the night that
"One-Eyed Willie" took "Shotgun Billy" to L.A.’s finest strip club for
his first (short-lived) exotic dance experience. "Lipstick" concerns a
predatory pick-up artist flashing his teeth and threatening to suck a
girl into his darkness. There are new wave synthesizers, demands to be
showered in blood, and Pink’s best
"Hey Little Girl" baritone. It might be the finest
Cure song since
"Friday I’m in Love".
Other times, there’s no need for subterfuge. The album’s finale, "Dayzed Inn Daydreams", refurbishes an old track from
Odditties Sodomies Vol. 1
with unnatural poignancy. The goofy voices and bipolar shifts are
jettisoned for a straightforward psych-pop song in the vein of
Love’s Forever Changes.
It’s difficult not to read as a veiled statement of purpose: an
anachronism to when his greatest fear was dying young and anonymous, a
musical John Kennedy Toole, with hundreds of unheard songs his only hope
for posthumous recognition.
The rest of the songs comprise crooked detours through Pink’s hometown. Fellow passengers include:
Kim Fowley, the immemorial L.A. gadfly who played "hypophone" on
Freak Out!, co-wrote with Warren Zevon, and managed
the Runaways; Don Bolles, the drummer from the Germs; novelist Alex Kazemi ("Not Enough Violence"), and producer/writer Justin Raisen (
Charli XCX,
Sky Ferreira).
But
the zigzags and bizarre pit stops are clearly at Pink’s behest. Opening
track "Plastic Raincoats in the Pig Parade" finds him hallucinating
cocaine banks, Tokyo nights, and Arkansas moons over what sounds like
psychedelic Ringling Bros. polka. "Dinosaur Carebears" riffs on Syrian
wedding music, shifts to a Tweedledum and Tweedledee melody, and then
finds Pink role-calling random L.A. neighborhoods: Tarzana, Reseda, the
City of Industry, Beverly Hiiiiiiilllls. Finally, the groove switches to
a cosmic space dub.
This is no haven for conventional logic or
normative restraint. "Negativ Ed" is pure Zappa homage, a gym class
anthem for delinquent rebels in an '80s B-movie. It’s ridiculous and
superfluous, but also endearingly whimsical. The same goes for "Nude
Beach a Go-Go", a time warp to the Malibu surf rock of the Frankie
Avalon and Annette Funicello era. But unlike the beach blanket bingo
wholesomeness of the censored past, Pink reimagines it as the nude
mating ritual it probably was.
One of Pink’s strongest gifts is
making the absurd seem real and the real seem absurd. If this album has a
closest predecessor in his catalog, it might be
Worn Copy, with
its weary refrain that "life in L.A. is so lonely." His coping strategy
remains a rich fantasy life, of which he’s occasionally the star and
sometimes the sardonic observer. You can see it on "Picture Me Gone", a
haunting meditation about how digital technology will erase all physical
evidence of our pasts. Set in the near future, the narrator’s age keeps
changing. Even at his most sincere, there is something protean and
shifty. Or as Pink seemingly indicts himself on "One Summer Night":
"Fantasies and fallacies/ All fairy tales and lies/ Time is running out
yeah/ Better write these lines." Or maybe you prefer "Exile on Frog
Street", in which Pink does his best karaoke of Jim Morrison circa
"Celebration of the Lizard".
The song concerns an "enchanted frog... waiting for his Princess
Charming to come and kiss him on his frog lips." When the kiss finally
comes, the toad turns into Ariel Pink. You hear the fairy tale magic
twinkle of a Disney soundtrack. Then you hear a frog’s ribbit.
You can interpret this as another surreal metaphor in his search for enchanted love or chalk it up to a teenaged fixation with
the Doors.
Maybe a little of both. He can be the frog prince, Shotgun Billy, or
ride shotgun in a pink corvette. He can be a rock'n'roller named Ariel
from Beverly Hills, complete with his own billboards. And in a place
where delusion, self-reinvention, and wish fulfillment have long been
the principal cash crop, who are we to tell him otherwise?
