Pretty in P!nk
I’m a channel surfer, especially when I’m driving in my car. It’s a fundamental, deeply ingrained behavior and the primary way in which I still stay in touch with pop music. Call me old school.
Over the past year, the voice that has stopped my wandering finger most often belongs to Alecia Beth Moore of Doyleston, PA, known professionally as P!nk, a family nickname.
I’d call P!nk a guilty pleasure, but in truth I have no guilt or embarrassment about being a fan (although it mortifies my 16-year-old when I roll up blasting Who Knew). This is a young woman with a flat out great voice, not just a great voice, but a great rock voice over which she has full technical control–roughening its timbre on emotional peaks, building intensity from start to finish in 3 minute crescendi, nailing pitches like the best of the best, using the very act of breathing expressively. She sings from a place where the great rock singers of the past sang from–working class disaffection. And she sings from another place too, some place fresh–a female machismo only matched by Courtney Love’s best records. (Maybe the passing of rock from pop music’s mainstream has something to do with the decline of the working class in the US, or maybe like everyone else, the working class has just gone hip hop.)
Aficionados know that it’s the singer, not the song, that makes the music move along, but I love P!nk’s songs too. Like everything else about the girl, her songs obliterate boundaries. They’re a little bit pop, a little bit rock and even the chirpiest of them have a dark, introspective center (her breakthrough hit featured the chorus Don’t let me get me/I’m my own worst enemy…as depressive a sing along chorus as I’m Down).
It’s hard to say that the girl has struggled in her career, with nine Billboard top 10s and two Grammys. But she’s labored to shuck the legacy of her first album–an LA Reid-produced dance pop confection that was pointedly not included in the P!nk Box assembled by Sony this year–and a marketing plan that pushed the girl into the the teeth of the teen pop explosion of the 90s. (”She’s a pop singer,” my 16-year old sneered.)
Alecia pushed back deliberately, titling her breakthrough second albumM!suntaztood and featuring the following verse in the record’s first hit : tired of being compared to/damn Brittany spears/she’s so pretty/that just ain’t me.
M!sundaztood is still P!nk’s best record, largely a collaboration with Linda Perry of 4 Non-Blondes. Perry’s party anthem I’m Coming Up was the record’s biggest hit, immediately a bar mitzvah and baseball stadium standard, but the co-penned, Dallas Austin-produced hits, Don’t Let Me Get Me and Just Like a Pill are the album’s signature songs, dark and light power pop.
P!nk followed up M!zundaztood with a career confounding straight rock move, Try This, written and recorded largely in collaboration with Tim Armstrong of Rancid and featuring a gender-bending cover photo of the artist: half-skate punk, half Weimer transvestite cabaret singer. The album rocked, and hit internationally, but confounded the American market. Trouble, the album’s hit, was a smoking rocker that the singer performed in ever changing arrangements. There was the album’s guitar pumping original pantomimed in a video in which the singer, in a Miss Kitty costume, kicks the asses of a barroom full cowboys. There was a classic acoustic duo performance on the American Music Awards. And the Try This tour a capella version, performed as as a Weimer pole dance with a crew of writhing women in pasties–filmed in concert before an audience of barely pubescent girls, the performance presents all the cultural dissonance of Hendrix opening for the Monkees.
The records that stopped dead my channel surfing this year were the hits from I’m Not Dead, P!nk’s 2006 album–still in heavy rotation on CHR radio. It’s a fine album featuring the best singing of P!nk’s career and a fully mature mixture of pop and rock that recalls a day some of us remember, when rock was popular music.
Who Knew and U+UR Hand aren’t the only great songs on I’m Not Dead. Just as good are the Long Way to Happy and Nobody’s Knows, a power ballad Edgar Winter wishes he could have delivered. Hell, the whole record’s excellent. Even the political acoustic song recorded with the Indigo Girls works. But the two hits, collaborations with the production team of Dr. Luke and Swedish hitmaker Max Marin, are particularly great, particularly Who Knew–the kind of surging, grandiose, romantic rock song you don’t hear too often on pop radio anymore with a crisp clean production featuring instrumental separation in place of excessive compression.
Oh, and did I mention, good god can this woman sing.
If the state of pop music is this good, what’s to worry about?
- Reading Expedition Continues
- Art Historians Need Pop Art Project Books
- Leveled Library Reading and Writing Center
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