Think P!nk: ‘I think that in the beginning I was definitely punk rock mentality, but now my anger is more focused’
There was a snotty little article in The New Yorker last year in which the magazine attempted to come to terms with the pop star P!nk’s rising popularity. The problem, as diagnosed by the magazine’s chief popular-music critic, was two-fold: first, P!nk (the exclamation mark is particularly irritating, I suspect, for intellectuals who are forced to write about her in literary magazines) couldn’t legitimately claim to be a rebel in the heavily commercialised pop world in which she now so clearly dominates; second, her lyrics were terrible. The article quoted a line from her hit single So What in which, in her typically autobiographical, bratty way, she bawls out her husband, a motocross rider called Carey, from whom she was in the process of separating at the time. “I’m all right, I’m just fine,” she bellows, “And you’re a tool.”
Her fans don’t seem to mind her speak-as-I-find lyrics (she has had something like 18 hits in the UK; she can’t remember exactly how many) and they pack not just concert halls but whole stadiums to listen to her fiery, poppy songs, which seem to veer thematically between the drunken night before (“I’m going to start a fight”) and the regretful morning after (“Please don’t leave me”), with a smattering of cultural critique in between: Dear Mr President (2007) vilifies George Bush; Stupid Girls (2006), takes a machete to materialistic, girly women such as Lindsay Lohan, with whom P!nk was reported to have entered into a “lesbian feud” at about the time the single was released. Disappointingly the “feud” amounted to little more than a teenage-level indiscretion: P!nk had let slip that Christina Aguilera had told her that she fancied Lohan. Something along those lines anyway. Amazing what drives record sales.
She will be headlining the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park in June, the first time a woman will have done so, but right now she’s at the tail end of a tour that has taken in most of Europe and Australia as well as bits of America, though Americans have always been lukewarm about her because, she claims, they like their stars “packaged”. The Australians, by contrast, adore her: “We get each other. They don’t like wrapping and cellophane.” She seems rather packaged herself. Isn’t she? “My albums are, but I’m not.”
We meet backstage at the ISS Dome, outside Düsseldorf. Offstage she is known by her first name, Alecia. Elfin and muscular (she trained as a gymnast for eight years), she is cheerful in a domineering way. “Do you mind if I take my shoes off?” she says as if asking my permission, but the boots are already on the floor.
In real life she hardly comes across as a rebel; indeed she protests that she never set out to be different. “I think in the beginning I was definitely punk rock mentality. Anti-authority, question everything, carve your own path. And I think I’ve done that in my little pop world in some aspects. Now my anger is more focused.”
She ascribes her extraordinary success to hard work but then adds that she feels that she connects with her fans “on an authentic level”. “I think probably my lyrics … I’m not subtle or poetic and I think that’s a big part of who I am and why I’m easy to connect to.”
Would she like to be more poetic?
“No, it’s not my way. I mean, sometimes I wish, yeah, I could say it like some other people do, a lot more eloquently: Lauryn Hill, Joni Mitchell, Paolo Nutini, anyone else really. I would say most people out there are singing songs that are a little more intelligent than what I put out. But mine are extremely honest. Mine are, ‘I’m getting out of bed today and I’m going to put one foot in front of the other. Come join me.’ ”
It’s something of a surprise that she’s doing so stratospherically well these days considering she’s been around for a decade — always “the underdog”, she says — an antidote to more self-consciously seductive female acts such as Beyoncé Knowles and Britney Spears. Partly, her continued popularity owes a great deal to the colossal lesbian following she’s garnered for herself, women she’s teased and cultivated over the years with repeated hints that she’s gay (which she’s not). Partly, also, she’s loved because her message is very much in tune with the zeitgeist. P!nk’s job, as she sees it, is to “lift up people out of paying their bills or worrying about their sick aunt” and that sits particularly well in a culture that’s fallen out of love with conspicuous consumption and is anxious about the future. Her concerts, extravagant and energetic as they are, are really “group therapy,” she tells me.
A key turning point in her career came after she’d recorded her first album, a heavily produced R&B hit called Can’t Take Me Home. Her label had strong ideas about the direction her second album should take but she was beginning to feel disillusioned. “It was the opposite of what I thought the music world was about, which was blood, sweat and tears.” There followed a period of altercation, but eventually whoever was in charge gave in — “16 million records later I said, ‘I told you so.’ ”
The “rebel” tag seems something of a red herring. Really, she’s one of those incredibly driven individuals who is aware from a young age of what she wants out of life. Growing up in Pennsylvania, she was thrown out of Sunday school “because I wanted to talk about the fact that Jesus was a Jew”. The rest of her academic life was spent frustrated: “I was anti-authority and ready to be on my own since I was 8. My whole goal in life was to drop out of school, get legally emancipated and hitch-hike across the country and get discovered on Venice beach.”
After her parents divorced, she lived with her Jewish mother, with whom she constantly argued and who sent her to see a psychiatrist — satisfyingly for Alecia, the shrink decided “the wrong person is on the couch”. When things deteriorated farther, she went to live with her father, a Roman Catholic, with whom she enjoyed a more harmonious relationship — he liked to play the guitar. By the time she was 14, she was performing in clubs in Philadelphia. At 16 she joined a girl group, Choice, and went solo not long after, dabbling in cocaine and crystal meth along the way, a habit that she eventually grew out of.
She’s far happier now, she says, than a decade ago, a time in her life when “I hadn’t really done anything. I didn’t know the true meaning of really hard work, I didn’t know what it takes to stick up for yourself or to make your own path or to put everything on the line because you believe in it.”
Her third album, Try This, bombed. But she triumphed again with her comeback, I’m Not Dead. It included the hits Stupid Girls, which won her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Dear Mr President, which went down well particularly with Germans and Belgians. Most of her songs, however, seem to chart her relationship with Carey. They’re reconciled now although he’s not with his wife in Düsseldorf because he’s racing dirt bikes. Generally theirs is an harmonious union nowadays, thanks in part to her persistence and cunning. “I have a Jewish nature which means guilt is bred in my nature. So I can carry guilt with the best of them and I can also give it. Ha ha.”
She lured Carey back with a photo album full of pictures of happier days together: “I gave it to him. I was like: ‘I don’t want to have this any more, I think you should have it.’ ” Overwhelmed by the memories, Carey eventually came around to the realisation that he missed his estranged wife. “It was a bit of trickery but it worked,” she says, obviously delighted with herself.
She’s still eye-wateringly ambitious. Even now she has an extremely long “bucket list” (“all the things you want to do before you kick the bucket”): have a photograph she’s taken published in Time magazine; be responsible for the rescuing of thousands of animals; make an acoustic record “that’s this generation’s Joni Mitchell meets Carly Simon meets Janis Joplin”. But a tap on the door interrupts her. It’s show time. And half an hour later she’s diving on to stage, by her own admission a flawed but straight-talking sequin-covered dynamo, extracting her visibly grateful audience for two hours from the trials of the everyday.
P!nk plays the O2, LondonSE10, on Tues and Thur
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Source: Timesonline.co.uk
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