All My Homies Love White Freckles, but They All Hate Ariel Pink
White Freckles is a psychedelic pop song written by singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-whatever Ariel Pink and co-written by the mysterious Kenny Gilmore, credited for drums, backing vocals, bass, keyboards, engineering, and editing as noted in the liner notes of Ariel Pink’s 2014 album Pom Pom of which White Freckles is the second track.
Before we begin, I encourage you to listen to White Freckles here, and don’t worry, this links to the Internet Archive, so you are doing no favors to Mr. Pink by clicking this link. In addition, the effectiveness of this article is heightened if you are not already familiar with Ariel Pink, but, knowing my audience (all three people or so), that’s probably not going to be the case. Regardless, give White Freckles a listen, preferably all the way through; then come back and start reading from here.
Well, do you hear it? That manic, jerky guitar line alternating between 6/4 and 4/4 over pounding snares? That bass line mirroring the spastic guitar whilst simultaneously managing to sneak in contraband notes between the jerky pauses, all while maintaining the funk? The whole thing sounds like it was captured with a cassette recorder in a bubble dome underwater; and do you hear when the timing sludges out during the verses and Ariel’s vocals come in, alternating between The Human League and some sort of unhinged Madonna impersonator, as if multiple characters are mocking or admiring (you can’t really tell) someone’s application of white-freckle makeup that they may or may not have gotten at the tanning salon? Of course you hear it, it’s White Freckles. All this, mixed with just a hint of cheap-voice-changing robotics and that middle-eight-interlude thing that feels like the music is being fed through a hurricane of lost-media sound effects and then fed through a vacuum cleaner, makes the whole thing sound as if it fell out of an alternate reality wormhole where the 1980s never ended and arcades still bleeped and booped around every corner and Patrick Nagel’s artwork was plastered on every billboard in every city of the world.
White Freckles is maniacal, mathematical, mechanical, memetic, both merry and a little bit maudlin, and just a knock-out masterpiece of a pop song. It’s also kinda silly. Everyone that I’ve played this song to, I’ve caught them, later on, sometimes days later, “do-do-do-do-do”ing or repeating “freckles, freckles, where’d you get those freckles?” as if Ariel himself was inside their brain pulling little levers like a cartoon villain. The music digs in and refuses to budge. You have to excavate it with another song of equal catchiness – and that’s hard to do, because White Freckles is very catchy indeed.
But, despite all that, this article isn’t really about White Freckles – all my homies love White Freckles, that’s not really up for debate.
And while all my homies may love White Freckles, they really fucking hate Ariel Pink – and that’s what this article is actually about.
Now that you’ve listened to White Freckles and read a few paragraphs of me gushing about it, and assuming you liked the song (which this whole shtick kinda hinges on), check out this quote from Ariel Pink.
“I’m so gay for Trump, I would let him fuck me in the butt.” -Ariel Pink (Jan 4, 2021. 1:01:10. some podcast interview)
*they really do
Yes, that’s Ariel Pink on Fox News, talking to Tucker Carlson about how he was “unfairly canceled” for attending the January 6th Trump rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol building. He claims he was there just for a “peaceful rally,” and that despite this, his record label, Mexican Summer, dropped him and he was ostracized from the music industry entirely. “It was cancel culture; the woke mob,” he says. And no, the quote above is not a meme or a joke, Ariel Pink is a huge MAGA guy. He spouts every single talking point verbatim: climate change denial, extreme vaccine skepticism (even though Trump supported and fast-tracked the development of the vaccines initially [source]; one of the many examples illustrating Republicans’ really bad memory and complete lack of principles), and the rest of the whole pantheon of dumb things. Ariel Pink was also accused of physically and sexually abusing his former bandmate and girlfriend, Charlotte Ercoli Coe. And I’m sure you could find more awful stuff on Pink if you went digging for it online.
I’m being kinda flippant about the various charges levied at Ariel Pink here (it’s all a matter of public record, really: every music outlet reported on this, even non-music publications like Variety and the LA Times), because this stuff isn’t actually all that important to the article. We could say that, hypothetically, Ariel Pink tossed puppies off bridges for fun and did all sorts of heinous Judge Holden-like things, if we wanted to. But, outside of these being the reasons that all my homies hate Ariel Pink, the reasons themselves don’t matter all that much. The reasons are not really what I want to write about. We all know that Ariel Pink’s worldview and the accusations surrounding him are capital-N capital-G No Good, and I shouldn’t have to convince anyone otherwise.
What I want to write about is White Freckles. I know, I know I said White Freckles wasn’t really the point of this article, and it’s not. What I really want to write about is the question around White Freckles. That being, you listened to White Freckles, you presumably liked White Freckles, but now that you’ve heard about Ariel Pink and his warped worldview and all the sexual abuse, you probably don’t like White Freckles all that much anymore – do you? You at least like it a little less than you did initially. You probably scrunched up your face and almost gagged at all the MAGA-sexual-abuse stuff, like I did. And that scrunchy-face outrage has been transferred to the music. White Freckles feels like a MAGA song now. But what I’m curious about is, why?
That’s what I want to write about.
The moment Ariel Pink showed up on Tucker Carlson Tonight, I knew that something had changed. I was a loose fan of Ariel Pink before all the accusations and the MAGA stuff, but after that fateful night I didn’t know what to do. The pioneer of hypnagogic pop had betrayed us. The entire fanbase immediately moved against Pink, which was understandable, and suddenly listening to Ariel Pink’s music felt like some sort of tacit admittance that you yourself might maybe just be a MAGA Trump nazi too and that maybe you should be shunned from every platform as well. The same thing happened with Morrissey of The Smiths, after he made racist comments publicly numerous times (another matter of public record); and a similar thing happened with R. Kelly (this one is really bad, look it up); and I’m sure the list goes on. To this day, if you post a link to a Morrissey song – or even The Smiths – on any social media platform, someone is going to reply with some vitriolic comment about Morrissey, and if that vitriolic person was following you before, they probably aren’t following you now because they saw your enjoyment of Interesting Drug as tacit support of Morrissey’s racism. (I can’t dislike Interesting Drug, that rockabilly semi-muted guitar stuff going on at the beginning is just wild.)
Did the quality of White Freckles change because Ariel Pink did something bad years after recording the song? Or was the song always tainted, and I was just a worse person for liking the song back then? And now, upon receiving this new information on Ariel Pink, should I stop liking the song, declare it “bad” just like Ariel Pink is “bad?” (Note, I am using the term “bad” here very loosely; you and I both know that calling music “good” and “bad” is near meaningless because it’s mostly a subjective preference, but I think you know what I am trying to get at here, as we probably hold similar values around most things if you happened to stumble upon this article at all; “bad” in this context means “MAGA-fascist-supporting ideological ruin” or something; you know: bad.) If I continue to like White Freckles, despite knowing this new information, am I somehow supporting Ariel Pink, endorsing and perpetuating his twisted worldview? If so, should I then reevaluate all the music I listen to and all the computer games I play and all the books I read from the lens of “did the creator(s) do something awful in the past and/or do they have politics I don’t agree with?” And, if so, I expect that this list will quickly become unmanageable, plus imagine all the mental effort I would have to expend just to maintain such a list. Something about this line of reasoning feels way off. Clearly the content of the actual song – the composition of the thing – has not changed. White Freckles has, and always will be, White Freckles.
It’s another thing entirely to buy Ariel Pink’s music, or donate to him on Patreon or listen to him on streaming platforms, as all of this supports Ariel Pink directly, and maybe you don’t want to support Ariel Pink. I don’t want to support him either. I pirated all his stuff, downloaded it all on Soulseek. Ariel Pink doesn’t get a penny from me. But there could be a deeper argument here, that even posting this article about Ariel Pink, or gushing about White Freckles, could possibly maybe support Ariel Pink in some roundabout way because someone might read this article and then be inspired to listen to Ariel Pink’s music on a streaming platform or, heaven forbidden, buy one of his records from his Bandcamp or something; and I don’t really have a good counter to that argument other than the fact that I am straight-up saying NO. Do. Not. Do. That. Do not give Ariel Pink money. The bright side (in this specific case, not overall) is that modern music streaming platforms are practically robbing artists anyway, so even if you did listen to Ariel Pink on Spotify – or whatever happens to be the popular streaming zeitgeist at the time of your reading this – you won't be supporting him much at all really.
Here's a stuffy quote from an old dead guy that may or may not have actually existed:
“It does not follow that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.” – Plutarch, Greek philosopher and historian
We don't have to like Ariel Pink, in fact, all my homies hate Ariel Pink.
There’s a discussion here about “separating the art from the artist,” and that’s a valid discussion, but it has been beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten to death again, multiple times. I will try to add my own twist on this zombified discussion, but I’m sure whatever I write here has already been written elsewhere. There’s an almost supernatural element to human creation; everything I write just kinda comes out and I can’t reproduce it later on; once the art has been released by the artist, it takes on a life of its own; the art, once birthed, becomes both solidified and open to interpretation, a state of contradictory flux; an artist's work can even be used against the artist later on in the event that the artist abandons previously held values. Artists can change, but the art itself cannot. And our interpretation of art can change, but the art itself is unchanging. The Mona Lisa will always be the Mona Lisa. Ariel Pink could rerecord White Freckles and add several MAGA verses, but that would not be White Freckles anymore; that would be the rerecorded MAGA-version of White Freckles, and I would not like or support that version.
We don't have to like Ariel Pink. We can refuse to support Ariel Pink while simultaneously loving White Freckles. We shouldn’t let Ariel Pink take White Freckles from us. We shouldn’t give him that much power.