Deeply weird and Kubrick-ian. Directed by Grant Singer. Why are we not surprised that he’s got a screenshot from The Shining on his Twitter page. As for the song, it is easily the best thing the Magnetic Fields have ever done.
RELATED: Last Tuesday, Ariel Pink, the Los Angeles musician known for pop songs that are catchy and inscrutable in equal measure, jumped into an S.U.V. outside his Williamsburg hotel and plugged in his iPhone as he headed to Staten Island for a gig. He directed his attention to Twitter, where he had become a sudden target of vitriol. An Australian Web site had just published an interview in which Pink said that Madonna’s label had asked him to write songs for her new album, which Pink thought was smart, given the “downward slide” of her career. This assessment did not sit well with Madonna—the Queen of Pop “has no interest in working with mermaids,” her manager said—or her fans. “Keep yourself in your irrelevant world, u’re nobody,” one tweeted. “All right, MySpace has chimed in,” Pink said, reading a tweet from the social network’s official account. “ ‘Ariel Pink is indie rock’s most hated man right now.’ Yes!” Pink, who is thirty-six and has shoulder-length blond hair, has been an indie darling for the better part of a decade: Pitchfork, the Millennials’ Rolling Stone, named “Round and Round” the best song of 2010, and Entertainment Weekly declared a recent concert, during which Pink crowd-surfed with a beer, to be the singer’s “coronation as some sort of hipster king.” “I’ve been the next big thing for, like, ten years now,” Pink said. He wore an unbuttoned plaid shirt over a plunging V-neck, with splotches of red nail polish on both thumbs. “I feel really old.” MORE
ARIEL PINK & JACK NAME PLAY UNION TRANSFER ON TUESDAY FEBRUARY 24TH