[Rolling Stone] Pink Fights the Power

Leave a comment

June 11, 2002 by Jessica Cardoso

She’s been tearing things up all her life, and as she hits twenty-two and triple platinum, she’s not about to stop now.

Pink is lying on the floor of her house in Venice Beach, California, a place where she’s always wanted to live. “I never felt like I really belonged anywhere, but I feel like I belong here,” she says. As she says this, she is situated between her pool table and the cage that houses her two pet rats, Thelma and Louise. Her right hand — with long, white nails, except her pinkie finger, which has a long dark nail, and her index finger, which has a broken nail — is on a bottle of Corona.

She always keeps her hand on her drink, a habit that’s a legacy of family dinners before her parents separated, when she was seven. It derives from the fear that she might spill her milk, causing this domino effect: Her mom would get on her for the accident, then her dad would get on her mom for getting on Pink, then her mom would get on her dad, and then, as she puts it in “Family Portrait” — from her current triple-platinum album, Missundaztood — World War III would break out. (In the fade-out of this song, while begging her daddy not to leave, she plaintively promises not to spill her milk at dinner, and to be a good girl.)

As a grown-up twenty-two-year-old, Pink is a blunt, obliging, generous, vulnerable, rambunctious and happy talker, whiskey voiced, ready to laugh and ready to provoke laughter. Her father used to tell her that if you’re always honest you may not have many friends, but you won’t have any enemies because they’ll know exactly where you’re coming from, and she seems to have taken this advice to heart. She describes herself as “a goofy, I-love-life, I-love-to-learn, I-love-pain, I-love-pleasure, I-love-it-all” person. She says life is all just a big learning map for her. So far, among the things she’s learned is how to make multiplatinum records — her debut, the R&B-heavy Can’t Take Me Home, came out in 2000.

She is barefoot and casually dressed, smoking Newports, in red capri-length Dickies with a red and white belt, a white wifebeater that says HURLEY and a black hoodie that says HARLEY-DAVIDSON. She is often described as a tomboy, because the Pink persona — the cartoon, video version of Pink — is a tough young lady. But the real Pink is also the kind of girl who puts artificial roses on her windows and four-poster bed (even though most of the time she sleeps on the floor). Her bed faces a mirror on which she has spray-painted “Alecia loves Carey.” Alecia is the name she was born with: Alecia Moore; Carey is her boyfriend, freestyle motocross star Carey Hart.

Her home is modest, about 1,500 square feet. Except for the plaques and awards and MTV Moonmen, and the presence of her assistant, Laura Wilson, who is supervising a guy hooking up the cable (“Yaaay! I have cable! I belong!” shouts Pink from her sliver of a kitchen, where she’s getting another beer), it might be the home of any rock-oriented twenty-two-year-old with a thing for Bob Marley, Janis Joplin and Aerosmith, all of whom are well represented by posters and drawings, along with Bruce Lee (“who I had a supercrush on when I was little”), Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and a bunch of frogs. “I love my frogs to death,” she says. “I love my little froggies.” She picks up a large frog figurine with a big, goofy, Rat Fink smile on its face. “This is my high frog, he’s superhigh. Doesn’t he look high?” And she laughs her whiskey-voiced laugh.

That whiskey-voiced laugh sounds like pure happiness, but according to Pink, it can’t be, because she believes pure happiness is not attainable. Missundaztood is, in the words of her dad, the work of a sad, lonely person, and it alternates feisty, can’t-keep-me-down attitude — “18 Wheeler,” “Get the Party Started,” “Just Like a Pill” — and the lamentations of a . . . well, of a sad, lonely girl for the family togetherness she never had — “Dear Diary,” “My Vietnam” and, especially, “Family Portrait.”

“You can’t be creative when you’re completely happy,” says Pink. “When I’m totally happy, I have no thoughts in my head. If life is a big search, then you’re never content, you’re always looking. And if you’re always looking, then you’re not completely happy.”

Pink’s musical influences are various. When she was a little girl, she stayed in her room for a week after Jon Bon Jovi got married, something she recently waited all day at a radio station to tell him. She also had childhood things for Sebastian Bach, Mary J. Blige, New Kids on the Block and 2 Live Crew; is currently into Citizen Cope, an R&B-flavored folkie; and when her pager goes off, it plays the opening notes of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

Pink’s dad, Jim Moore, says he first knew she would be a star when he heard her sing Madonna’s “Oh Father” at the Germantown Academy, outside of Philly, when she was ten. “She sang, and you could have heard a pin drop in the place — and there was about 2,000 people there,” he says. “And right then, I knew it was definitely going to turn into something. She just absolutely wowed the crowd — they were standing, they were clapping, there was a standing ovation for her.”

Not that Pink’s path to stardom was a straight line: She was born with a collapsed lung and was often sick as a little girl, with asthma, pneumonia and ear infections. Her earliest memory is of her dad singing her to sleep in his rocking chair — “How to Handle a Woman,” from Camelot, which he also sang to her on the day she was born, and Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl.” “I’d usually hum or sing her to sleep,” he says, “and she’d sleep on my chest all night. This is from when she was an infant to the time she was three or four.”

Pink lived with her mom and her brother after her folks split up, except for a stretch when she was fifteen, when her mom couldn’t handle her anymore and she went to live with her more disciplinarian dad. From adolescence on, she performed in various punk and vocal groups, toured with a break-dancing team and got busted by cops numerous times: for, among other things, running away (one time making it to Maryland, hitchhiking, when she was twelve, but mostly just going to friends’ houses), for stealing a copy of Showgirls from Blockbuster, for trespassing on school property at night with an open container of alcohol, for kicking a school bus that was being driven by a man whom she believed had made racist remarks to one of her friends and for breaking and entering to retrieve her diary from the home of a girl who had stolen it and was plastering pages of it in the halls of Pink’s school. She did and still does oppose authority in almost all forms, from the police to the federal government. She believes our country is warped, complacent, and blind to prejudice and abuse of power.

“I liked pissing my teachers off,” she says when asked if she enjoyed anything about school. “I enjoyed dressing up for school so people would look at me weird. I enjoyed walking down the halls listening to Bad Religion, drumming in the air. I enjoyed trying to get my teachers fired.

“I waged a war against the public school system. I just think teachers have way too much authority over children, and that teachers should be paid more so that they care more about their jobs, and should be screened better so that they’re not biased, prejudiced, racist, sexist assholes that get to shape your children and the way they think about authority and life.” She says all the papers she wrote in school were about animal rights or legalizing marijuana. Not long ago, she combined these interests by talking to some of the pot plants she was growing but not the others, to see whether caring behavior toward non-human entities makes a difference. It did.

Any questions? Feel free to ask them, because Pink famously refused to take her record label’s suggested media training: “He was trying to change me, change my whole thought pattern,” she says of her media coach, “and I almost felt violated. One thing the guy told me was, ‘If it’s a guy, flirt.’ I said, ‘You’re a total asshole for that comment, right there. What if it’s a girl — I can’t flirt?’ ”

Pink’s trip to the top wasn’t a stage-parented voyage. “It was like she was trying to be Madonna, with all the bracelets, and the crazy shirt over shirt, and crazy shoes,” Jim Moore says. “I used to say to her — because she’d sing the same songs over and over and over — when we’d be in the car going someplace, I used to say to her, ‘Alecia, God almighty, change the channel, will ya? Try another song.’ And she’d say, ‘Dad, I’m practicing because I’m gonna be a star someday.’ And, of course I can’t say anything except, ‘You’re right, you did it. It’s amazing, you actually did it.’ ”

Pink, in other words, is a self-starter. She originally signed with LaFace as part of a girl trio, Choice. After more than a year of recording with them, she took her record-company president L.A. Reid’s advice, went solo and spent more than a year recording Can’t Take Me Home. “L.A. would hook me up with producers,” she says, “and I’d walk into the studio like, ‘Hi, how ya doing, yeah, we have this song, go in the vocal booth and sing it, no, do it like this, it’s nice to meet you, bye.’ And I was like, ‘This is what music is? This is the process? This sucks.’ ”

She didn’t want to spend her life singing other people’s songs. So when the time came to make her follow-up, she hunted down former 4 Non Blondes lead singer Linda Perry (one of the things Pink was busted for was disturbing the peace by singing 4 Non Blondes songs out a window; the band had one hit, “What’s Up?,” in the early Nineties). Together the two of them wrote most of the record, and it was an exhausting process. “I get out all the unimportant stuff, but I keep all the important stuff inside,” Pink says. “Just the past. Vulnerabilities. Insecurities. I was so drained when I was done on that record.” She pauses. “Me and Linda had, like, five years of friendship in six months.”

Initially, according to Pink, Missundaztood‘s almost New Wave pop was not greeted by the label with unalloyed enthusiasm. Reid says it took him only a few days to come around. But he agrees that Pink will fight for what she wants. Of the attitude suggested by the recent hit “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” which contains the line “L.A. told me, ‘You’ll be a pop star/All you have to change is everything you are,’ ” Reid says, “I am the kind of guy who will say, ‘Pink, I think you can be a superstar, but let’s work on this and this and this.’ She treats everyone with the utmost respect, even when she’s dogging me in magazines, which I love. So I thought it was cute, I really did. I don’t love the character in the ‘Don’t Let Me Get Me’ video who portrays me. I’m far sexier than that.”

“Politics is what I tried to get away from by being a musician,” Pink says, hand on beer bottle, Newport between her fingers. “And I figured out it’s not that way at all. But I’m dealing with it. And that’s another reason why I did this record. So that everybody could kiss my ass, and I don’t care about your formulas and your orders and your rules. I think you have as much power as you command. You have to put everything you believe on the line to get what you want. If you’re not willing to do that, you’ll never get what you want. I was onstage with a full band when I was thirteen years old, doing all-ages clubs, stage diving, one o’clock in the morning, having the most fun in my life, living my dream. Then I get a record deal and I’m singing to a DAT and it’s like karaoke. And I’m watching drag queens in Vegas do it better than I ever could. And I’m like, ‘What’s this? This is not going to keep me alive.’ I had to do a record that would keep me above water.”

–

Source: Rolling Stones