Pink, a rebel who’s never faded away

AN INVITATION TO visit Pink in Venice, California, a few blocks from the beach, for a home-cooked 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 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, 9-monthold Jameson, making only a moderate mess with his spoon-fed mush. (The 6-year-old Willow was elsewhere with her father, the 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 to his nanny and began dressing a salad with the uncertainty of a 20-something playing dinner party.

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, I don’t get mentioned – 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 has burrowed in a niche. Since her debut, Can’t Take Me Home (2000), Pink has sold more than 16 million albums and some 45 million digital songs in the US, according to Nielsen Music.

She’s had 23 songs in the Billboard Top 40, including her current single, What About Us. She headlines arenas around the world and will perform on Saturday Night Live on today, a day after the release of Beautiful Trauma, her seventh solo album.

Still, “I had the whole sitdown, 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 currently 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 self-esteem anthems such as Raise Your Glass and Just Like Fire and modern power ballads such as Try and Just Give

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. It’s not fun, and it doesn’t feel good.” Pink