Interesting article about avant garde music artist Ariel Pink's cancelation by the Left

I was introduced to Ariel Pink by an uberliberal friend of mine during a playlist trade well over a decade ago. I remember thinking then (and still now), that Pink was a super strange dude but fascinating in a Goddess Bunny geek show kind of way. He was also an early influencer of the neo-80s aesthetic that has now made its way into the releases of mainstream pop super acts like the Weeknd and Taylor Swift.

I'm not sure what suddenly made me think of Pink after so long out of mind, but I did a half-hearted Google of him and was shocked to learn that he had become yet another victim of the recent cancel culture phenomenon. If a guy like this can be turned into an untouchable overnight, then no one is safe from the purge mob. What follows is an extremely well-written article about Pink from that rarest of music journalist--an expert and avid fan of the indie music/art scene who also happens to be a critical thinker brave enough to swim against the crushing wave of Leftist hysteria. You don't have to be an Ariel Pink fan to appreciate the article's broader implication regarding the vapidness and blind loyalty to the religion of Progressive think:

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It was a sunny Wednesday morning in February, and 43-year-old Ariel Rosenberg, better known to the world as Ariel Pink, had an empty schedule. The former indie rock icon had descended into a state of professional living death, a condition that looked as irreversible to him as actual death. His career was now a list of accomplishments that didn’t matter anymore. He drew no encouragement from his 800,000 monthly Spotify listeners, or the 20,000 listens—now up to a healthy 120,000—for a recent single he had done nothing to promote and that the music press had ignored. His fortunes were disconnected from his run of four consecutive albums that had received Pitchfork’s coveted Best New Music distinction, all of which had cracked the Billboard 200. He was shunned and unwanted despite past collaborations with pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Azealia Banks, which were only footnotes in a vast catalog spanning a quarter-century, an output whose sound and sensibility had gone from that of an unknown teenager tinkering with an eight-track tape recorder to the defining rock ethos of the 2010s, simultaneously unsettled and propulsive, meaning and meaninglessness suspended inside layers of kitsch and haze and nostalgia. It was like none of it had ever happened.

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Rosenberg’s career collapsed when he attended the January 6, 2021, rally at the White House, an event which he has been at pains to explain is distinct from the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol several hours later. Amid a media fury, Mexican Summer, his label and owner of most of his discography, announced they had dropped him. An appearance to plead his case on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, along with harassment allegations from an ex-girlfriend, sealed Rosenberg’s ostracism. He can no longer tour, for fear that venues will be boycotted and that promoters will refuse to work with him. Longtime friends and collaborators vanished. Ill-wishers have photographed Rosenberg and his wife, Lyndsie Earle, in their neighborhood and posted their stalker images on social media. Earle says her husband has received “hundreds of death threats” since January of 2021. Just going out in public carries potential consequences. “I’ll go somewhere and people tweet about it immediately,” Rosenberg told me.

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Cancellation, the most important recent artistic movement native to the United States, is the enforcement of a sweeping new values system whose power has nothing to do with how many people buy into it, and certainly not with the quality of the choices it makes. Rather, it is an action-oriented aesthetic that joins the perceived self-interest of upper-level management to the higher idealism of the artists and institutions at the bottom of the multibillion-dollar American cultural ecosystem. At every stage of the culture industry, from artists to the entertainment executives they despise, and from moguls and ownership to the rank-and-file labor they exploit, everyone reached the simultaneous conclusion that America’s moral, political, and intellectual space had become unacceptably or even dangerously permissive. Cancellation came from the pressures of the moment, from an earnest sense of social responsibility, and from a dark and eternal human need to control and exclude from which artists are not immune. The arts were deemed to be infested with racists, misogynists, transphobes, and other enemies of progress whose work or behavior felt suspiciously off in the fevered, life-or-death struggle that Donald Trump, white supremacy, the patriarchy, the coronavirus, TERFdom, rape culture, and the impending climate apocalypse had all unleashed. A culling was overdue.

At the receiving end were the Ariel Pinks of the world, who never cared if they fit in even before the cancellation craze, and proved incapable of protecting themselves once it came for them. Rosenberg’s career is the story of how indie rock purged monsters that the culture had wrongly tolerated—or perhaps it’s the story of how even the most supposedly open sectors of the American creative scene abruptly slammed shut, losing any remaining patience for the complexities and cognitive dissonances that form the bulk of human existence. Both are really the same story, of how American culture got so stupid and so boring so quickly.

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Ariel Pink - "For Kate I Wait"

"How Pitchfork darling Ariel Pink became a music industry untouchable" Tablet Article