Ariel Pink Won't Stop Making Music
Canceled Indie Icon Plays Vegas
Exalts Art Over Politics
A Trumpist in a Teapot
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 …