Pink Takes Rebel’s Path to Enduring Career
LOS ANGELES — An invitation to visit Pink for a home- cooked Monday night dinner could seem like a contrived play for authenticity. But it’s hard to remain skeptical when faced with a giggling baby.
Faux-intimate or not, the domestic scene recently featuring Top 40’s long-reigning rebel was disarmingly unpolished, with 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, the former motocross racer Carey Hart.)
Pink has spent nearly two decades selling her relative edge and honesty from within the pop machine. Now 38, she 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 .”
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 headlines arenas around the world.
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 J. Trump.
“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. Since 2000, she has released a single every year except one.
In a trade not known for its sensitivity to women’s lives, Pink denied experiencing much overt sexism firsthand. “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, the executive L. A. Reid.
Mr. Trump makes her angry. “It’s not even about politics anymore, 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 Mr. Trump’s infamous vulgarity.)
It was also with motherhood in mind that Pink wrote the MTV V. M. A. s speech that she delivered last month while accepting the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award.
Motivated by her daughter’s ad- mission 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.”
That wasn’t her first draft. Initially, Pink said, she wrote a speech responding to those online who said she didn’t deserve the lifetime achievement trophy, a throwback to a time when her “anger was everywhere” and “I couldn’t hold my tongue,” she said, with added expletives.
But getting older and gaining perspective has its advantages. “I can choose my battles now,” she said. So after reading the original speech to her husband and being told it sounded bitter, she ripped it up and started again.