Think Pink

Pink in The New Yorker. I'm no expert, since I've not listened to two of her songs back-to-back, but it seems to me that the mere fact that her lyrics seem to be about something (getting the party started or self-esteem usually) sets her apart from most of the artists she's most often compared with. Let's call her a Triple-A Christina Aguilera, though her bratty video persona can be a bit hard to take and Sasha Frere-Jones detects a pot/kettle situation.

Two songs on “I’m Not Dead” showed the strain of constructing the perfectly balanced anti-commercial commercial act. “Conversations with My 13 Year Old Self” is confessional writing at its least necessary. If Pink somehow managed to deliver these oily pearls of wisdom (“You’re the girl I used to be, you little heartbroken thirteen-year-old me”) to herself, I can’t imagine the younger Pink listening. More troubling yet was “Stupid Girls” (co-written with a group that included Billy Mann—as sure a predictor of a Pink failure as any name in her credits), a song that tries to recapture the mission-statement feeling of “Missundaztood” but fails owing to a lack of generosity. The song and the video seek to distinguish Pink from Lindsay, Paris, and Jessica, and the lyrics sincerely ask, “Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?” Pink has shown no small amount of flesh in her rise to the top, so calling out anyone else’s bra tactics is a highly suspect move.