How much is Ariel Pink worth?
| Net Worth: | $14 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Singer |
| Date of Birth: | June 24, 1978 (age 43) |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | Unknown |
About Ariel Pink
Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, also known as Ariel Pink, is an American musician, singer, and songwriter who was born on June 24, 1978. It is estimated that Ariel Pink has a net worth of $14 million.
Born in: June 24, 1978, Los Angeles, California
Key Albums:The Doldrums (2004), Worn Copy (2005), Before Today (2010)
Young Years
Ariel Pink was reared in the Pico-Robertson/Beverlywood neighborhood after being born Ariel Marcus Rosenberg in Los Angeles. At age 10 he began creating songs, and at age 16 while a stoner in Beverly Hills High School, Rosenberg recalls, “I had this voracious appetite, at the time, for the history of music, and I just wanted to join the club,” he started putting together homemade recordings on a crude analogue multi-track. Lacking any musical “chops,” Rosenberg would carefully put together recordings practically note-by-note; even after years of recording, he still found it “hard to play any instrument for more than a couple bars.”
Taking inspiration from the pop of his youth—Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, 10CC, Fleetwood Mac—and passing it through a bizarro, outsider art-fetishizing filter, Rosenberg was uninterested in creating “indie music” from the very beginning.
“From the first time I picked up a tape-recorder,” Rosenberg would tell me, in 2005, “I certainly had an appreciation for the esoteric; the things that wouldn’t make me popular in school. I was pretty happy playing the iconoclast at the time, so of course I anticipated being totally shunned.”
Beginnings
Following a brief period at the California Institute of the Arts where he studied visual art (“I had a typical art school experience,” he would later tell Identity Theory, “if you consider getting drunk at openings, partying with your ‘teachers,’ and shrugging off scholastic duties as often as possible as something typical of college”), Rosenberg immersed himself in music. Before ever performing them in public, Rosenberg would home-record over 500 songs while living with his parents and working part-time at record shops.
His layer-cake method caused his constantly “bouncing” recordings to get murkier with each additional overdub. Despite not initially pursuing this sound as an ideology — “I was aware that there was a “underground” or “lo-fi” movement, but it never dazzled me as such in those terms” — he quickly came to identify with this distorted sound as his own. In particular, considering that resistance was fruitless.
“I’ve spent a lot of energy and thought trying to sabotage the Ariel sound on many, many occasions,” Rosenberg says. “I’ve tried to do note-for-note covers, exact replications of original recordings that I want to sound like nothing more than what I’m copying, and I just can’t do it. In fact, doing that, it just sounds more like me; perhaps because I don’t have the talent to recreate things convincingly.”
2003 brought Rosenberg good fortune. He shared a disc of his recordings with the band while at an Animal Collective concert with “mutual acquaintance” Jimi Hey (of Beachwood Sparks and All Night Radio). When Animal Collective finally got around to listening to the CD, they immediately wanted to put something out by Ariel Pink on their Paw Tracks imprint, despite the fact that Rosenberg “didn’t expect anything” of doing so (I didn’t even know they had a label, he’d later acknowledge to Junkmedia).
The Doldrums, released in 2004, introduced audiences to “the Ariel Sound,” which is akin to a warped Hall & Oats cassette that has been collecting dust for 20 years. After receiving favorable reviews, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti series quickly expanded to include 2005’s Worn Copy and 2006’s House Arrest.
Live performances by Ariel Pink were far less well-liked. Initially, Rosenberg simply sang karaoke-style to background tapes; subsequently, he would assemble a brand-new band each night of a tour. In either case, it was a disaster. He would complain to LA Weekly that “People boo me everywhere,” They don’t even try to hide their disdain.
Rosenberg worked to clear much of his backlog of recordings after the initial wave of Paw Tracks releases on a number of low-profile/limited-edition albums, including Lover Boy in 2006, Scared Famous and Underground in 2007, and Oddities Sodomies Vol. 1 in 2008.
The unanticipated impact of Ariel Pink on popular culture was evident as the lo-fi movement underwent a substantial, sizable, fashionable renaissance in the late 2000s and one-man home-recorders drew more and more from the commercial songs of the 1980s. Thus, it wasn’t a huge surprise when he signed with mega-indie 4AD in the latter part of 2009.
Breakout
Before Today, an album by Rosenberg’s debut recording project for 4AD, included a four-piece band called Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. The album, the first Ariel Pink album that wasn’t put together from old home recordings, was easily the best fidelity recording Rosenberg had ever been in charge of, and it introduced him to a completely different audience.
On the release of Before Today, Rosenberg screamed, “We need to be huge right now. “We’re going for broke on it.” Indeed, it quickly became the most well-received record of his career, winning numerous album-of-the-year accolades and establishing Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti as one of the year’s most exciting new musical groups.
It would be unintentionally funny if another musician boasted of working with “Quincy Jones’ grandson,” a desperate attempt to gain some sort of name recognition that may, in theory, boost sales of the song. But rather than being a case of D-grade celebrity trafficking, Ariel Pink’s association with Sunny Levine—who is, in fact, Quicy Jones’ grandson—is a near-perfect example of pop-cultural coincidence.
The Los Angeles analogue-tape alchemist (real name: Ariel Rosenberg), who released his seemingly endless vaults of homemade recordings under the moniker Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti LP throughout the ’00s, executed a special perversion of popular music. Through the use of dated, well-worn pop song cliches that he has gleaned from a lifetime of listening to Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, Steely Dan, Roxy Music, and others, Rosenberg has heightened the widespread sentiment of nostalgia for previous songs. Each of his songs serves as both a nostalgia exercise and a reflection on nostalgia; it’s like a time-travel trick that gives the impression that something is pre-aged, arriving already distorted, covered in dust, and neglected.
There would have been a risk that Rosenberg would become a bit too slick or too close to his source if he had collaborated with Quincy Jones. Therefore, working with Jones’ grandson maintains a perfect distance. And the debut studio album by Ariel Pink, Before Today, fits the bill: it still sounds enigmatic, remote, and odd, but it doesn’t require a pall of tape-hiss to produce the effect.
The end result is Before Today, Ariel Pink’s best album to date, even though admitting so feels somewhat deflating. This is, after all, the first Ariel Pink album ever truly made as an album, not only the first Ariel Pink album ever made in a studio. This is the first time Rosenberg has ever sat down to make a complete LP, entirely from scratch, after six (or so, depending on how you count) records built from his massive collections of old recordings.
The end result, Ariel Pink’s best album to date, captures Rosenberg’s many well-known eccentricities in song form. Examples include “Fright Night (Nevermore),” with its John Carpenter-inspired synths, “Thriller” dance moves, and sinking feeling of unavoidable dread; “Can’t Hear My Eyes,” with its yacht-rock harmonies and glissando synths; “Beverly Kills,” with its knocking out slap-bas
Then there is “Round and Round,” a song that seems to be effectively introducing Ariel Pink to, if not the masses, then certainly masses more people than would have previously known about him. It harnesses the elastic bass funk and soft-pop harmonizing that are present throughout in unique ways, making it a true pop smash in wolf’s clothing. With lyrics like “Over and Over,” and “merry go round/we go up and around” Rosenberg argues repetition as the song’s natural state, similar to Hot Chip’s breakout smash tune “we die, and we live/and we’re born again.”
Ariel Pink’s imitations of pop tunes, however, have up to this point felt as though they were given in quotation marks. Rosenberg may have improved as an actor as a result of the production, he may have gained experience and knowledge, or he may simply be suddenly feeling very sincere. However, you can’t help but believe him when he and his Haunted Graffiti outfit sing the refrain “Hold on, I’m calling/calling you back to the ball/and we’ll dazzle them all,” repeatedly.
This time, the masks are off, the lo-fi haze is gone, and Rosenberg’s skill as a composer is more apparent than ever.
