"It’s probably one of those defense things where my identity is so entrenched in appearances, how I’ve never really felt like a man."

"So maybe that’s part of the gender-bending thing. Maybe I inch closer to the estrogen side, and it gets mistaken for style. I am just a guy, a heterosexual guy, but at the same time I’ve got this very queer sensibility that I’ve just been endowed with. And maybe it comes across as being mismatched in my more recent years. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t really know how I come across at all and I’ve kind of thrown up my hands. I just kind of leave it to the blogs or whoever, to the kids, to write it off as being probably like ‘throwback hipster chic,’ which I guess I sort of patented, inadvertently."

Ariel Pink explains himself. In case you were wondering. I'd never heard of him until Meade sent me that link (which goes to the NYT), but apparently, he's a currently popular singer. I clicked on the first video of his that was linked in the article, "Picture Me Gone," and I stopped in the middle — never to restart — and said 2 things:

1. I don't see why this guy is a singer. I sort of get being interested in his clothes — that caftan reminded me of Donovan (and if this is impressive "gender-bending," Donovan did that 50 years ago) — but he's not just being put before us in the news as a fashion person. We're supposed to be interested in him because he's a "purveyor of eccentric, ironic indie pop." Shouldn't he have a good voice? I don't get it. (Cue the commenters who will tell me for the umpteenth time that Bob Dylan doesn't have a good voice. (I only wrote "umpteenth" because I've noticed no one says "umpteeth anymore, and perhaps because I'm an umpteenager, what with my endless interest in the singer who struck my heart when I was just 14. (And excuse me for shifting to Dylan from my original focus on Donovan, who was "mad about 14" when I was 15.)))

2. Too suicide-y! Picture me gone? I checked the lyrics — which are actually quite clever — to see if my sense that the title/repeated phrase was a suicide threat, and I believe it is. I was surprised to see that it's in the voice of a father speaking to a son. He's taking a "selfie" — I guess this is video, with the song as the audio track — and saying he's put it on his iCloud "so you can't see me when I die." You can't see him because he's going down to Mexico to die: "I left my body somewhere down in Mexico." He recommends using "Find My iPhone" to find the body. That got me thinking about the guy who went to Mexico to kill himself and: "Decided that if I was gonna die anyway I might as well fuck a prostitute before it was all over. After that a cab driver offered to sell me cocaine. One thing lead to another, and I got a room above a whore house equipped with a heart shaped bed, a stripper pole, and a hot tub. Spent a full week snorting coke off tits, popping pain meds, drinking tequila, eating handfuls of Viagra to fight the whiskey/coke dick, and had three FFM threesomes. Somewhere in the midst of my coke-fueled orgy, I decided life wasn't so bad after all." But that story came out too recently (12 days ago) to be considered the source of Ariel Pink's song (posted on YouTube 15 days ago). Viral marketing maybe? The Mexican drugs-and-whores story appeared on Reddit and the song has all these new-media references: selfies, iCloud, Find My iPhone. Just a theory!