Ariel Pink is a test that America might never pass. Between the late 90s and not so long ago, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, aka Ariel Pink, was the creative and commercial edge of true psychedelic freakdom, playing every instrument on a series of swampy self-released astonishments before penning several of the bona fide classics of the 2010s indie boom. “While y’all nigga masturbate, I’m in that Ariel Pink,” Donald Glover rapped in 2011. Charting four albums on the Billboard 200 and recording with Miley Cyrus, Rosenberg could’ve gotten massively rich and famous by making his sound everyone else’s sound too. Instead, he decided that such debasements are better left to the Jack Antonoffs of the world. Then he blew his whole career by attending the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 — though not the festivities at the Capitol later that afternoon — at which point the music suddenly ended.

Rosenberg was decried as the face of indie rock’s alleged male fascist undercurrent and summarily fired from his record label, the Brooklyn-based Mexican Summer. A decision to go on Tucker Carlson Tonight to defend his right to support a man who received 74 million votes from our fellow Americans hurt Rosenberg’s case with the scolds who decided to deny him the opportunity for gainful employment. The threat of bad publicity and staff revolts at any venue brave enough to book him made it just about impossible to perform live and promote new work.

But 600,000 monthly Spotify listeners prove the existence of a massive audience that doesn’t care about Rosenberg’s pro-Trump politics. If he is effectively barred from profiting off of his considerable talent through live performances, it would mean that the moralizing strain in American culture, a weapon of elites and wannabe elites, can prohibit the delivery and perhaps even the creation of art that people actively want. As long as Rosenberg doesn’t have a career, we all seem doomed to live at the whims of people who are suspicious of art itself, who distrust and even oppose the notion that there exists a sublime and uncontrollable creative realm far superior to politics and “justice,” and who see the rest of us as being dangerously free. 

Wouldn’t it be great if that wasn’t true? The Ariel Pink comeback tour during February and March of 2024 represents the hope that it is still possible to live in weirdness in America, though Rosenberg does not see it that way. “We’re reminding the world that I exist — that I’m not dead,” he told me in the zebra-patterned greenroom at Backstage Bar & Billiards in off-Strip downtown Las Vegas, the second stop on his first serious multicity swing in six years. The Triple-B accommodates 90 percent fewer people than New York’s Terminal 5, which Ariel Pink headlined in 2015, and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 10,000 who saw him at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound in 2018. 

He said he was still effectively banned from playing in New York City, the Bay Area, and his home city of Los Angeles. Well, I said, at least there are 270 million Americans who don’t live in those places. “They happen to be my biggest markets by orders of magnitude,” he replied. In better days, taste-making New York would be a tour’s great monetary and critical payday, while LA was his home, the natural end point of a cross-country musical trek. Gripping an unlit cigarette, pointing from the long sleeve of an olive-colored Dickies jumpsuit, his hand traced the zigzags of a tour with no objective, beyond the modest one of playing for whoever showed up in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Dallas, and the 11 other middle American cities he’d play over the next three weeks.

For weeks I’d wondered who would show up to a canceled indie icon’s comeback bid. Had Rosenberg’s professional martyrdom won him a MAGA following? Would people who remembered Ariel Pink from the Los Angeles psych-rock scene that he almost single-handedly created make half-guilty trips to Vegas, to see him a safe distance from judgy locals, or did those people now pretend to have never liked him? Maybe he’d be all alone onstage in Vegas, one brave freak against an increasingly stupid world. Maybe he’d fulminate over his lost career — really go the punk route and declare that he’d done nothing wrong and that he didn’t need anyone’s pity or forgiveness.

The night before, in Phoenix, he had performed in front of local weirdos and Mexican teens and fans from the old days and people who couldn’t possibly have had any firsthand experience of his early 2010s peak. A young piano tuner and his girlfriend were so amazed by what they’d seen in Phoenix that they’d driven the five hours to Vegas for an encore — later we figured out that during the mania over Before Today, Rosenberg’s most lauded album, they had both been either eight or nine years old

Any expectation of “Ariel’s Revenge Tour” was swiftly dispelled in the spacious backstage greenroom. He really did have a band. Shags Chamberlain, the laconic, physically towering Aussie art-rock producer who had been Rosenberg’s bassist for much of his career peak, noodled his instrument on one of the zebra banquettes. David Stagno, a bleach-blond keyboardist and guitar player who joined up with Rosenberg post-cancellation and mastered the finger-busting interpolations and tempo changes of the Ariel Pink songbook, was so unassuming that I briefly wondered if he was a younger fan who’d snuck in through the side door. Alan Connor, the drummer, played a solitary game of pool.

“There’s always been a way back. There was always a market. No one was ever gonna lose any money on me,” Rosenberg proclaimed. He is a baby-faced, mop-topped 45-year-old with intense and active eyes that angle mysteriously away from whomever he’s talking to. He speaks quickly and quietly, in an even state of agitation. AI, he said, “is a bogeyman — it’s for people who lost their faith in God.” Apparently, the growing ranks of prominent Scientology heretics were filled with deliberate plants who were part of some larger scheme. There was nothing in his puckish, nerdish bearing that suggested he was moments away from commanding a rock and roll stage.

Hearing a hunched, thin man in a jumpsuit rattling off the evil secrets of existence in a windowless room gave the momentary feeling of being in a deep bunker where an ethically questionable yet potentially earth-shattering scientific experiment was about to take place. America and humanity were on a grim path, and music could do little to help, Rosenberg cautioned. “Music is a good lather to make life worth living, where you don’t have to bother yourself with these horror stories,” he explained, minutes from showtime. “You don’t want to think about that. You want to live a good life.”

The Triple-B is across Fremont Street from the El Cortez Hotel, which a consortium of Jewish gangsters owned in the mid 1940s. The Spanish villa–style gambling pavilion is one of the few casinos in Vegas with its original exterior and neon sign, and perhaps the only one where visitors immediately encounter a plaque announcing its enshrinement in the National Register of Historic Places. Las Vegas exists atop an endless reservoir of distinctly American hope, predation, and illogic — these being our true national patrimony and the psychic precursors to the gambling urge.

The fundamental Vegas experience, as I learned on a prior trip, is the cold, numb disembodiment that descends whenever you lose more than $100 in fewer than 15 minutes. Anyone who’s gambled enough knows the titillating thrill of free fall and can sense it emanating from other people. The longstanding local arrangement, in which everyone agrees that it’s great fun to allow criminals or perhaps a giant corporation of pseudo-criminals to manipulate your belief in yourself to the point that you’re briefly addicted to lighting money on fire, was once thought to be so repulsive that it had to be physically quarantined within a remote desert basin, where this thrilling poison could be injected within a fake hacienda or a giant glass pyramid or maybe ancient Rome.

It is in the act of concealment that we can see America’s most gloriously naked self. Between visits to the craps table you are in the midst of a great national pageant, especially on down-market Fremont, the promised land of $1 blackjack, $3 shrimp cocktails, and $50 hotel rooms. There are photo hustlers dressed as, say, a Halo commando or a white-mouthed Tyrone the Crackhead from Chappelle’s Show, street performers in stripper outfits, weed shops, vomit, enterprising bums in various states of deformity, a restaurant where you eat for free if you weigh over 350 pounds, and a whirlwind of competing prime rib deals, for those who find it especially important to sustain the lie of classiness (the prime rib at the Cortez happens to be very good). The landscape belongs to a society in which nothing except for maybe God and His Son are so elevated that they’re exempt from being kitschified and where cultural memory is retained only briefly, and by accident. What better town for a comeback? Elvis and Britney did it here, and Michael Jackson might’ve pulled it off too if he’d lived long enough for his scheduled Vegas residency. Ariel Pink was here to follow in their footsteps for one awesome, redemptive night.

The Triple-B might have been any club in any city off the coasts: People were there for the quaint reason of wanting to see an artist they actually really liked, rather than to feel cool or to witness some great psychocultural drama. There were no MAGA bros and few veteran LA scene creatures in a crowd that was younger, more diverse, and more female than Rosenberg’s late reputation as a Trumpist ghoul would have you believe — a Hispanic girl in an MF Doom hat clutched a copy of Loverboy, a long out-of-print 2001 release for sale at a permanently mobbed merch table. Fans had flown in from Uruguay and Toronto. A black man with long dreadlocks skanked through all two hours of the show. Onstage, Rosenberg deepened this happy variance between perception and reality. Backstage, I had struggled to imagine how his transformation into a credible rock star would occur, how he could go from an outcast jumpsuited weirdo to a real-time commander of the fundamental elements of art. And yet it happened: Free of any apparent bitterness, without even a hint of disappointment that he wasn’t at Terminal 5 or Primavera, Rosenberg proved to the people who loved him that he was still here, that the bastards hadn’t gotten him and never will.

He had no fancy production, nothing but fingerless black gloves, three musicians, and some of the great American rock songs of the twenty-first century. Shags wore a puffed-out Dracula wig, a black cape, blue Hawaiian short shorts, and no shirt — a disguise so blatant that it seemed a visual riff on the idea that it was now shameful just to be seen with Rosenberg. “I know most of you people haven’t heard of us before,” Rosenberg quipped about midway through, in what turned out to be his only notable stage banter of the night. “You wouldn’t be here if you knew me.”

Of course they all knew him, and that’s why they were there. The crowd erupted in glee during the tempo change at the end of “White Freckles”; the band lost itself in the corkscrews of the comedown anthem “Another Weekend” while an impossibly young couple, the man’s head swallowed up by a white cowboy hat, slow-danced a few feet away from me. The disco guitars on “Round and Round” bounced into an ecstatic emotional high, and Ariel Pink’s inscrutable hit sounded happier to me than it ever had — but then the Wagnerian “Dayzed Inn Daydreams” became an eerie, existential lounge dirge, with Rosenberg’s voice dodging from low to high on every repeated chorus, driving the performance deeper into the psychic fog. 

The backing tracks and live playing faded in and out of one another, as if there were a second invisible band playing at the same time as the visible one. Rosenberg’s voice changed within and between songs. The strange effects on his recorded works were revealed in performance to be echoing howls, whistles, yodels, grunts, and whooshes. Those uncanny harmonies, combined with chipmunk squeaks, a nasal British Invasion vibrato, and low demonic rumbles, emanated from one mouth. 

In performance Rosenberg’s natural voice remains hidden under his console of knobs. When he isn’t mixing his vocals into a heady oblivion he often looks down and stands completely still, even when there’s a mosh pit of leather-jacketed girls breaking out in front of him — but then a moment later he’ll assume a half-ironic lover-boy crooner mode, leaning back, bellowing, dancing with the mic stand, smiling even. The band played two unreleased songs, which were both good enough that I mistook them for classic-period deep cuts. One more song turned into four or five, and when it was over the crowd did something you don’t often see after a two-hour show at a mid-cap venue: chanting for another number even after the house lights came back on.

Toward the end of the set, Rosenberg sang his biggest Spotify hit and gave a sense of what his career might have been if he’d done what he was “supposed” to do. “Baby,” from 2012, is a smooth, glittering construction, free of his usual chaos and humor. The ear can’t easily separate the analogue and digital elements, making it a stranger and better forerunner to the current raft of successful mass-produced pop. “Baby” turned out to be a stand-alone, a path not taken. The path he did take, thank God, is summed up in last year’s “I Wanna Be a Girl,” which is a winking confessional, a heavy synth-line satire on the gender-identity hornet’s nest, and an absolutely colossal live number.

It turns out Rosenberg never needed much from the rest of us beyond the chance to keep making music. So long as he can tour there remains some ricocheting echo of the last sonic boom of American rock, that final moment in the early 2010s before streaming, the internet-attention economy, and the subordination of art to the politics of a boring and predictably elite-mangled music industry. To see him perform in 2024 is to experience what the culture has lost, and to be reminded of what can still be reclaimed. Rosenberg’s shot at redemption is about whether everyone else will get another chance, too.