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It’s no secret that Pink has a beef with the Pop tarts whose genre she inhabits, but on her latest album I’m Not Dead‘s first single, “Stupid Girls,” she threw punches at every other Sunset Strip paparazzi whore you’ve read about in Us Weekly during the past four years. The video is a smorgasbord of the brassy singer role-playing everyone from Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to the distressed, stumbling Olsen twins. To think, she once dreamed of living the lives these camera-friendly waifs embrace.
“You know, when you’re young, you have this idea of being famous and making money and, you know, being a Rock star,” she explains. “So you taste this carrot, and the carrot, it tastes like spinach — only I don’t really like spinach. So, early on, my famous line was, ‘I’m not doing it. Send me back to McDonald’s,’ because the pay-off wasn’t fun enough, it wasn’t interesting enough. I would’ve burned out if I didn’t have a chance to take risks.”
Pink can still remember the night it all clicked for her, too. Not long after she moved to Venice Beach, she hit her first Los Angeles club, a world where being perceived as cool is more important than … well, having fun.
“I was sitting there, just baffled,” she says. “This is what you do? No one’s dancing. Everyone’s looking at each other. So I went outside, found the first homeless guy with a guitar and hung out with him all night.”
It took Pink a while to come to terms with the business she had entered and what she calls “this whole art of commerce thing,” but, after 180-ing her career from more generic Pop, she found herself in a whole new ballpark, unexpectedly supported by her label and able to experiment with her musical identity. She’s persistently mutated with every album, morphing into something different and always more challenging. In fact, she’s one of the few Pop stars willing to take risks without fear of failure (which has happened, like the commercial flop that was her last album, Try This).
“It’s a very simple fact: I get bored easily,” she points out. “I don’t like to repeat myself. I feel like my voice is my instrument and I want to use it in as many ways as I can and keep trying to be better in every way — as a human, as a writer, as a singer. To just do something that scares me. And other people, too … which I seem to be very good at.”
Her fourth outing, I’m Not Dead, continues to surprise, if only because it’s her most self-conscious, introspective album yet; she tackles the risks of fame and celebrity, personal metamorphosis and regrets and even a failing presidency.
“I feel like I sort of woke up and took my blinders off,” she says of the recording experience. “It’s a more aware album for me, I think.”
It’s not exactly difficult to see why she doesn’t fit in with most of her contemporaries, especially considering the divide between the mindless way Pop visionaries like Simpson line up to shake their tits in support of George W. Bush without the benefit of polysyllabic words and how Pink rails against the maestro of international diplomacy on “Dear Mr. President.”
“How do you sleep while the rest of us cry?” Pink asks in the song, which features guests The Indigo Girls. “What kind of father would take his own daughter’s rights away/And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she was gay … You’ve come a long way from whiskey and cocaine.”
Pink says she wrote “Dear Mr. President” in the studio on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2005, pissed off, baffled and burdened by questions. As soon as it was released, fans quickly came to expect the song to follow up “Stupid Girls” as a single, but the possibility of that was quickly dismissed.
When asked why, Pink says, quite succinctly, “For a personal reason, that song is too important to me to allow others to look at it as a publicity stunt.”
It might have something to do with the role her father, Vietnam veteran Jim Moore, played in Pink’s life.
“I am Jim Moore’s daughter in every way,” she says, more than proud of such a declaration. “I loved the fact that my dad was a vet, I loved the functions I went to. I loved marching on Washington with him. He absolutely made me into an independent, do-it-yourself, to-thy-own-self-be-true person.”
But that doesn’t mean they saw eye to eye often — especially regarding “Dear Mr. President.”
“He said, ‘Isn’t it great you live in a country where you get to say things like that?’ ” she says.
Still, the plight of the U.S. soldier is never far from Pink’s mind; she’s one of those “unpatriotic” Americans who support the men and women on the ground, but not the commanders sending them to their deaths. This “patriotism” is probably why she opted to include a song written by her father as a hidden track on I’m Not Dead, fulfilling a lifelong promise to him he never took seriously.
“(‘I Have Seen the Rain’) is a song my dad actually wrote in Vietnam,” she says of the Loudon Wainwright III-style acoustic tribute to war veterans everywhere. “It’s the first song I ever learned. We’d sing it at campouts. I would always tell my dad, ‘I’m going to be rich and famous and I’m going to record that song on one of my albums. And he’d say, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”
It closes out the eclectic album that, sure, might come off as uneven, but all together, it speaks volumes about the woman Pink is: an artist, a reluctant product and a boat rocker of the worst kind. One has to wonder if she knows how to take the easy road anywhere.
“No. I’m trying, though,” she says, laughing loudly. “I try to choose my battles now, instead of fighting all of them.”
PINK performs Thursday at the U.S. Bank Arena with Justin Timberlake.
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.
