In the Pink

Pink, mainstream pop’s favourite rebel, has stuck around in an industry littered with yesterday’s stars. With a new album and hit single, the singer talks to Joe Coscarelli about the fight to remain relevent, her loathing of President Trump and learning t

The American star and mother of two talks about politics, pop and the battle to stay at the top

An invitation to visit Pink in Venice, Los Angeles 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 is 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, nine-month-old Jameson, making only a moderate mess with his spoon-fed mush. (Willow, six, 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 wears tattoo-baring overalls and diamond earrings as she passes the baby (named for the whisky) to his nanny, and begins dressing a salad with the uncertainty of a 20-something playing dinner party. Sandals emblazoned with the words Frigid Whore sit 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, peakcd, 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 says. “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, duckdiving.”

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 United States, according to Nielsen Music; 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 earlier this