Pink reminds listeners it ‘Hurts 2B Human’
Maeve McDermott: Latest album the perfect soundtrack to life’s struggles
Pink has emerged as pop music’s queen of the soundtrack. From her successful take on “A Million Dreams” from “The Greatest Showman” to her music’s seemingly ubiquitous presence in TV commercials, the 39-yearold singer has become known for making the kind of pop music that algorithms have decided works well as background music.
Call her a sellout if you want. We prefer to think of Pink as a star who has only gotten better the further she has progressed into her career.
Though her younger pop peers may get more buzz, she has forged a successful and sustainable path forward in pop by making accessible music that hits at enough hard truths, and lets enough of her salt-of-the earth personality shine through, that we stay engaged.
Those moments are the highlights of her new album, “Hurts 2B Human,” with the right mix of high-drama pop theatrics, raw wisdom and just enough doom-and-gloom to be the perfect soundtrack to life. Highlights include the album’s Khalid-featuring title track with a refrain – “God, it hurts to be human” – that doubles as the mission statement for so many other Pink songs. Listen beyond the album’s lukewarm initial single “Walk
Me Home” for the real heat, the wrenching harmonies of “90 Days” or the laid-bare lyrics of “Happy.”
The latter serves as the spiritual sequel to her early hit “Don’t Let Me Get Me” in its real talk about self-loathing.
That always has been Pink’s relative advantage over other pop stars in her space. She has a willingness to deliver plainspoken, searingly personal lyrics that touch on marital troubles, family problems and other personal matters that cut deeper than some of her peers’ own self-confessional songwriting.
“Circle Game,” the album’s penultimate track, borrows the name of one of Joni Mitchell’s classic songs for Pink’s own take on the circle of life, as she sings about growing up not for yourself, but for your child. “I’ve got a little girl of my own and she looks at me,” she sings. “Like I’m a badass, and you know that I wanna be / And now there’s monsters in her closet and they wanna come and play, I start looking for my dad to make them go away / I know ... that it’s my job now.”
Wouldn’t that be the perfect song to soundtrack a contemplative family moment in an on-screen drama?
Even the album’s less standout moments – the big EDM drops or the more contrived lyrics that have lost their emotional core along the way – would work quite nicely in the grand scheme of an equally dramatic, mainstreamaccessible narrative.
If the sales for “Hurts 2B Human” are anything like the impressive success of Pink’s 2017 album “Beautiful Trauma,” it’ll be proof that, decades into her music career, she’s as capable as ever of creating moving art that appeals to her fans.