Artist:Ariel Pink
Song:Another Weekend
Album:Dedicated to Bobby Jameson
Singer songwriter Ariel Pink has been around for over twenty years and he's still on the fringes of the music business. He seems to prefer that to traditional success. So he's happy doing what he wants and he has a cult following. He was born Ariel Marcus Rosenberg June 24, 1978 in Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was two years old. He got into record collecting as a child. He was influenced by videos that he saw on MTV. He got interested in "death rock" bands like Bauhaus and The Cure. In high school, he called himself a "goth" and stopped listening to new music. He started listening to retro music. When he started recording in 1996 on a cassette recorder, the music was experimental in nature. Then he studied fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts. Pink didn't like that the school focused on marketing rather than technique. He met John Maus and they became best friends and roommates. He recorded an album in 2000 while he was on a drug binge. Pink became a big fan of lo-fi music pioneer R. Stevie Moore and eventually they would collaborate. It looks like the next couple of years were a drug haze. Then he got back into new music when he started working at a record store. Pink gave one of his CDs to the band Animal Collective. They signed him to their Paw Tracks label. The distribution got him a following. He toured some but he decided he wasn't going to release another album until he got a real record deal. That was with the British label 4AD in 2010. The 2010 album Before Today was critically acclaimed and that's when he picked up much of his fanbase. He released three albums for 4AD and then he switched to Mexican Summer for the 2017 album Dedicated to Bobby Jameson. Jameson was an unsuccessful 60s singer songwriter who resurfaced in in 2007 with a blog and a YouTube channel complaining about the predatory practices of music industry sharks. Jameson died in 2015. This resonated so much with Pink that he dedicated the album to Jameson. This album is available as a budget CD. This is his latest album. Pink made a deal with Mexican Summer to release some of his old masters. When it was reported that Pink attended Donald Trump's Jan. 6, 2021 rally, Mexican Summer dropped him. He is currently working on a new album which will be self released. I have listened to Ariel Pink and I don't care for his voice. I think he was fortunate the music press latched onto him and gave him a fanbase. Now that he isn't on a label with wide distribution, he may have disappeared already. Here's the video for Another Weekend by Ariel Pink.
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