I didn’t think much of Ariel Pink until his triptych of videos from the 4AD-released album pom pom started showing up on YouTube. All directed by Grant Singer, they offered a hook into the artist whose recordings can be challenging. But the lush visuals and narratives of Los Angeles misfits make them hard to turn away from—more arthouse noir films in miniature than music videos. Soon, the songs themselves became the craving.
I think of the video to “Picture Me Gone,” in particular, as a time-release capsule; a slow revelation of greatness, which doesn’t just sit in the mind but leaves graffiti on the psychological landscape that only comes clear once you’ve passed it by. It’s easy to dismiss the video, and Pink himself, as a weird outlier until you stop and engage.
The storyline imagines the lives of three latex-masked loners in Los Angeles, their faces featureless, blank canvases the viewer can project onto. It’s creepy in a Twilight Zone way, both hip and mundane—a reality show of Michael Myers’ urbane relations and their erotic lives. It has an otherworldly quality, a horror movie devoid of overt horror, which is not so different from how Los Angeles actually feels.
The motifs of the uncanny contribute to a work that’s disembodied of meaning but also impossible not to interpret. All at once it might be about gender fluidity, erosion of identity, alienation, abortive attempts at connection, or possibly something entirely different, as the bare nipple pointed at the thirsty housecat would imply—an aesthetic I’m calling ‘dark cozy.’
The sunny, atmospheric video saves the song from all the suicide ideation one could bring to the tantalizingly bleak lyrics. Which begs the question: do we want to be saved? Pink will never be a comfort-listen, and the few swoony ballads like “Picture Me Gone” are outliers in his oeuvre. Mediated death and mimetic suicide always have their comforts, and are one reason artists who kill themselves skyrocket in popularity.
But Pink’s not that kind of artist. He is more remote, cloistered, contrary, and unrestrained. He’s a flasher throwing open his overcoat and accosting you with taxidermy badgers, Zippy the Pinhead comic strips, the likeness of Santa Muerte burnt into toast. His vibe is Dadaist, more in the vein of The Fall and Kurt Weill than his stated influences would suggest. Though maybe in his exuberant need to provoke, and to refuse to let you in on the joke, along with his relentless creative outpouring, Kanye West is his closest ally. Like Ye, he does so little to court favor, to be liked, which is in contrast to depressive musicians of his generation—Elliott Smith, for example—whose misery seems to yearn for company, understanding, and empathy.
Like David Lynch, who mined and then introduced us to our common dreamscapes, Pink doesn’t drape his work in melancholy. What’s beneath it all is a sincerity that belies the irony one expects of artists of his generation. It’s the unguarded selfie posted just to know somebody is looking, even if it’s only the camera, our pictures increasingly a stand-in for our personalities. Maybe imagining losing your iPhone is a kind of suicide ideation.
According to Pink, the song is about the modern condition of having all your memories locked inside a smartphone, without analog versions to preserve them. If you die without sharing your passwords, what remains of you? What if your device is lost—“down in Mexico”? But there’s something more personal at work here. Pink’s own past in Mexico—sent to live with relatives to escape high school bullying, and losing his virginity to a prostitute at thirteen—adds another layer. The song carries echoes of an ’80s sex comedy about loss of innocence as much as it critiques the fragility of digital memory.
The lyrics “Picture me gone / Picture me gone/ Picture me not” present the audience with a nifty zen koan, as you can’t picture something that’s not there; an Instagram account curating the void. Yet he’s not requesting that the listener contemplate this; he’s commanding them. Fittingly, Pink was canceled by people who mistook his artistic outsider tendencies as political affinities and then felt betrayed when this proved wrong. Moreover, the “Picture Me Gone” video and equally pathos-filled “Dayzed Inn Daydreams” come and go from YouTube, so like their creator. Pink’s mode is to be missed, to be present when not there. Pink asks the question: without our selfies, our social media accounts, do we exist at all, and what will be remembered of us when they are deactivated or locked? Pics or it didn’t happen. But what if the pics disappear as well?
Matt Henderson Ellis 