She isn’t one for mincing her words is P!nk. Not just
when she’s penning lyrics. She’s as outspoken in interview - which
is truly remarkable given her huge profile and the inevitable entourage of
PR types and minders that accompany her these days. Surprising and refreshing,
she’s throaty (she gave up smoking recently) and a little jet lagged
but on good form. And to think I thought it was all carefully crafted rock
chick image. “I don’t think a day has gone by where I don’t
piss somebody off,” she laughs. “People hate to hear the truth.
I love it. I almost get off on telling the truth because it is too much for
people sometimes.”
Four albums down the line, selling a cool 23 million discs so far, recently
married, P!nk, real name Alecia Moore, is on a wave and shows no sign of stopping.
On her new album, I’m Not Dead, she takes her trademark outspokenness
and genre-hopping, and runs with them - hard and fast. “This album is
a product of my own experience,” she says. “I don’t hang
out with celebrities. I hang out with real, nine-to-five people. My family
are real working-class people. I don’t sit holed up in my mansion with
my poodles and think everything’s fine. I like to stir things up, create
discussion and highlight the ridiculousness of it all.”
No more so than on the first single from the album Stupid Girls which got wall-to-wall
airplay earlier this year and caused a stir with the way it lampooned designer
handbag-carrying bimbos. “It’s a conversation I’ve been having
with so many people for a long time about this epidemic, this image that’s
being force-fed down people’s throats of what a woman should be. That
you have to dumb yourself down to be cute. If those are the people, then who
are the rest of us?” And plenty of people talked about it. Some 8.6 million
downloaded the video before the single was officially released.
Forthright she might be, but whilst previous work has been largely personal
- the diary of a girl growing up, typically a little obsessed with herself
- the new album shows a desire to engage with broader issues; like society’s
obsession with stick thin chicks. “I turned 25 and started paying attention
to the world around me,” she says. “It’s kind of hard not
to these days and I just feel like you have to use your time as responsibly
and irresponsibly as possible while you’re here.”
So she wrote a song about Bush. Dear Mr President is a biting, acoustic lament,
sung with The Indigo Girls, in which P!nk wonders how George W sleeps. ‘Let
me tell you about hard work, minimum wage with a baby on the way… building
a bed out of a cardboard box…’ go the lyrics. Interestingly she
sticks to social issues like poverty and women’s rights, avoiding the
war on terror. “I’m very conflicted about this,” she frowns. “My
brother’s in the Air Force and I do have a respect for the military.
It’s a commitment and it’s a sacrifice and, you know, I’ve
grown up with factual visuals of all the good they do for their communities.
The camaraderie is amazing. There’s a loyalty there that I’ve never
seen in any other group of people.”
Read the full interview in the current issue of RedHanded.
IN THE P!NK
Album number four in the can, a couple of Grammys on the mantelpiece and 32 million record sales to boot, this rock chick’s on a roll