HOW PINK BECAME WORLD POP ROYALTY
AN INVITATION to visit Pink in Venice, a few blocks from the beach, for a home-cooked Monday night dinner could seem like a contrived play for authenticity. But it’s hard to remain sceptical when faced with a giggling baby.
Faux-intimate or not, the domestic scene last month featuring Top 40’ s long-reigning rebel was disarmingly unpolished: an entryway cluttered with roller skates, stuffed animals, kites and bike helmets; a chicken in the oven; and the singer’s second child, the 9-month-old Jameson, making only a moderate mess with his spoon-fed mush. (Willow, 6, was elsewhere with her father, former motocross racer Carey Hart.)
Pink, who has spent nearly two decades selling her relative edge and honesty from within the pop machine, is not quite Martha Stewart. She wore tattoo-baring overalls and diamond earrings as she passed the baby (named for the whisky) to his nanny, and began dressing a salad with the uncertainty of a 20-something playing dinner party. Slide sandals emblazoned with the words “Frigid Whore” sat nearby.
This is the life of a well-adjusted veteran star, who’s not quite sure how she’s survived this long and stayed this sane. A vestige of the Y2K, peak-CD, MTV “TRL” generation, Pink, now 38, hasn’t melted down or ever really gone away, a fact she owes to never having been “the one”.
“I’ve never won the popularity contest,” she said. “I was never as big as Britney or Christina. If you look at any paragraph about pop music – my name doesn’t come up. And yet, here I go again, right under the wave, duck-diving.”
It’s not that she’s been ignored, or burrowed in a niche. Since her debut, Can’t Take Me Home, in 2000, Pink has sold more than 16 million albums and some 45 million digital songs in the US; she’s had 23 songs in the Billboard Top 40 (including her current single, What About Us), with four No 1 hits and 11 more that reached the Top 10.
She headlines arenas around the world and performed on Saturday Night Live this month, the day after the release of Beautiful Trauma, her seventh solo album.
Still, “I had the whole sit-down, you know: ‘Just be prepared, they don’t play girls over 35 on Top 40 radio’,” the singer said. “There are exceptions, but they’re songs, not artists – unless you’re Beyoncé.”
And yet here she is again – What About Us is No 15 on the pop airplay chart – a beacon of longevity in an industry obsessed with the new and nubile.
Generally more brash, more aggressive and more androgynous than her contemporaries, Pink has managed to become a populist stalwart known for her self-esteem anthems ( Raise Your Glass, F*****’ Perfect, Just Like Fire) and modern power ballads ( Just Give Me a Reason, Try), not for the intra-pop feuds and other tabloid dramas that dominated her early years.
At the same time, she has kept the reputation of a progressive truth-teller, dissecting beauty standards in a viral speech dedicated to her daughter at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards and speaking openly about her disdain for President Donald Trump. ( What About Us may sound like a relationship song, but it’s about the current political moment, she said.)
Pink’s career has also provided a workable blueprint for the female pop-outsider archetype – embodied now by Halsey, Kesha, Alessia Cara and more – a role she claimed explicitly in 2001, when she sang: “Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears/She’s so pretty/ That just ain’t me.”
In Pink’s world, such concerns never really fade. “I can’t win the game of ‘I want to be on every magazine cover and I want to be the prettiest and the best singer and the best dancer’ and all that,” she said. “It’s not fun, and it doesn’t feel good.”
Instead, she has focused on honing her live performances – including the acrobatic aerial dancing that has become a trademark – using regular tours, soundtrack songs and guest appearances as lily pads between pop eras. Since 2000, she has released a single every year except one.
On Beautiful Trauma, Pink is once again playing the part of the mainstream’s favourite nonconformist, singing of insecurities and imperfect relationships replete with drinking and fighting, but with an idealism that shines through and ensures maximum marketability. She’s always been a savvy collaborator.
Still, the music is hardly a reinvention, with Pink’s manager, Roger Davies, calling it “just a con- tinuation of the previous records” – that is, 13 well-crafted pop songs that can get her back on the road. But as much as she’s remained steady, the business has changed. The rise of streaming – the biggest shift since Pink’s previous solo album in 2012 – presents a fresh challenge. “I don’t think 35-yearold moms are really streaming that much,” Pink said of her audience.
“I’m a ticket-seller,” said Pink, crediting Davies, who has managed Tina Turner, Cher, Joe Cocker and Sade, with conceptualising her live-centric strategy. Though she’d had hits and sold millions, Pink was still opening for Justin Timberlake well into her career.
And yes, she’s seen the memes about her reliance on flying stunts. “How many times do you see the same artist get up and lip-sync and dance?” she countered. “And you’re mad at me for doing something none of them can do? And I sing live!” Being the mother of two young children, however, complicates touring. After Willow’s birth in 2011, Pink promptly made an album and returned to the road, daughter in tow, though the experience “definitely took like five years off my life”, she said.
She plans to repeat the arrangement with both kids and more managed expectations. “There’s been many mornings when I look at myself in the mirror with tears in my eyes and I’m like, ‘You can’t have it all’,” she said. “There’s always a compromise.”
In a trade not known for its sensitivity to women’s lives, Pink turns to humour to cope. She laughed heartily while telling a story about the miscarriage she had before getting pregnant again with Jameson.
Though she denied experiencing much overt music-business sexism first-hand – “People think I’m insane and aggressive and I’ll bite them,” she said, pleading ignorance about the sexual harassment allegations made against her former mentor, LA Reid – Pink was less magnanimous about the super producer Dr Luke, with whom she last collaborated in 2006.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said of Kesha’s much-publicised claims that he was sexually and verbally abusive. “But I know that regardless of whether or not Dr Luke did that, this is his karma and he earned it because he’s not a good person.
“I have told him that to his face, and I do not work with him,” she added. “He doesn’t do good business, he’s not a kind person, he doesn’t do the right thing when given ample opportunities to do so.” Dr Luke declined to comment. Trump stirred similar anger. “It’s not even about politics any more, it’s just about human decency,” she said, noting that her father, a Vietnam veteran, voted for him. “‘So you hate me?’ That’s the last thing I said to him about it. ‘You don’t respect me as a woman. You wouldn’t mind if someone walked up to Willow at the mall and grabbed her?’” (She added Trump’s infamous vulgarity.)
It was also with motherhood in mind that Pink wrote the MTV Video Music Awards speech that she delivered in Augwust while accepting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.
Motivated by her daughter’s admission that she felt ugly, the singer relayed what she told Willow: “We don’t change. We take the gravel and the shell and we make a pearl. And we help other people to change so they can see more kinds of beauty.”
I’ve never won the popularity contest. I was never as big as Britney or Christina