“I have always had to put pen to paper and just scratch out my rage, since I was little. And…to be able to put that in motion, to melody, and have other kids scream it out the same way that I…that they go to the same place that I was at when I wrote it…it’s just like group therapy. Writing is everything to me” – Pink.
Last May, the American singer Pink brought out a live album, All I Know So Far,
and a documentary of the same name. The titular song came out at the same time,
as a lead-in to the album and documentary.
A country-tinged, love-cum-future-guidance letter from Alecia Beth Moore to her
daughter Willow, it was written when Pink thought she was going to die of covid,
and wanted to compress anything she had to say about life into a song for Willow.
The song is a truly excellent one, and I love it. I read out lyrics from it as
poetry to a group of second year high school pupils recently. I was pointing
out to them that, even if they don’t think they’re fans of poetry, they’re
still listening to it in popular music.
All I Know So Far got decent rotation on Central FM, the local radio station
for Falkirk, my Scottish home town at the time. I noticed something odd
happening when I was driving round and heard it: I got goosebumps, and started
to feel quite emotional, having to run over somebody’s poodle or nearly kill
a pedestrian to toughen myself back up. After all, who can drive with tears in
their eyes? Hardly bears thinking about. Dangerous hardly covers it. Bloody shameless artists, arousing feelings in people! A disgrace!
After all, Pink was recently named the UK’s most-played female artist of the century, and she was awarded the accolade for a very specific reason: her universal tales of trial and terror and trauma and transcendence resonate with a great many people round this wee island, and round the world. She truly does seem to articulate mentally and emotionally what a lot of people truly think and feel, more specifically women, and that’s a rare thing these corporate-autotuned times indeed.
I first heard of Pink (back when she still had pink hair!) in 2001 with Get The Party Started (not to be confused with the cover version by pensioner English crooner Dame Shirley Bassey – though they don’t look or sound much alike, so it should be alright)(laughing), when she started to get big over here on the back of her second album, Missundaztood. Ironically, I heard her on the telly of an American couple I was paying a social visit to at the time.
Over the
years, I bought some of the albums but not others. But I was always impressed
with Pink’s sense of humour, bouncing tunes, and great, vibrant, totally alive
pop songs. Her songwriting methodology is pretty well established now; a tough,
take-no-nonsense woman hiding her sensitivity and bruised, throbbing soft
centre with songs about battering guys and taking no shit from women, all done
with a feminist twist and shout.
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2021/07/white-caregiver-blues.html
But that’s a different time and place and, in this case, the past is a literal foreign country. Been back in Scotland for going on six years now, and that stuff all comes from my American wilderness years, 2005-2016. But man, I loved that album when it came out! So many good songs, so many great lyrics! And it was that album, after endless listens, that made me realise, quite simply, how much Alecia Beth Moore wanted to be taken seriously as a writer.
With that in mind, I am going to talk about this hardly-discussed aspect of her work because, as a writer, it’s something I find extremely interesting. I won’t get too in-depth about most of her career, mostly just make the odd observation here and there, with the odd deeper dig and delve. And I will only be discussing bits from The Truth About Love album, because to do anything else would take forever and a day. So just take it for what it is, and we’ll get along just fine. Just doing this for fun, really, and to sort out a few ideas about the woman’s work in my own head. Shrug.
This album was the one that made me realise that Pink does lyric videos all the time for her songs, clearly spends a great deal of time and money on them, making them look good, and would not do this if she didn’t think it was/is/will always be important. And that album does have some great lyrics, as do all of her others, to a greater less degree. So let’s see what we see and hear here…
The album The Truth About Love kicks off with Are We All We Are:
The song starts off with what sounds like the drums at the start of the classic 1987 Beastie Boys rabble-rouser LP Licensed to Ill, another brilliant work I have a great many memories wrapped up in. That’s the thing about Pink’s compositions: you hear the work of other artists sometimes gliding and sliding through her songs, different years and eras and times and sonic tides ebbing and flowing. It’s not done out of any sense of plagiarism, obviously, but these ghostly past pop echoes are sonic markers that show where she has been and what and who she has been inspired by.
Pink is clearly a lover of pop music in all its glorious notorious forms, not a snob, and is justifiably proud of her sterling contribution to that emotions-moving vast American musical recorded history since the mid-20th century. She waves and plants wee transatlantic pop flags to let us know where she has been and point to where is potentially going. The album starts off as it means to go on with Are We All We Are (a great title, sung sounding like the childhood chant “Olly olly oxen free!”), and as usual it’s crisis time in Pinkworld:
“Cut to now, holy wow, when did everything
Become such a helluva mess?”
I really like that as an opening jumpshot for an album. It’s instantly
impactful, tense, scene-setting, cinematic, jump-cutty. The tune for Fly Away
by Lenny Kravitz slips through the song to put in a brief grinning headnod cameo.
“Seven seconds, seven seconds
That is all the time you got to make
your point
My attention, my attention’s
Like an infant tryin’ to crawl around
this joint
I know we’re better than the masses
But we’re all followin’ our asses
And if our shit is not together it’ll
never be
You and me, plant the seed
Open up and let it be”
I love the wee bit above. Frustration pours from Pink during this song about
potentially unrealised potential, the massive mess the mass of the human race
is in, what we can maybe do about it, and how our attention spans have been
killed during the 21st century. I just love the line “Like an infant
tryin’ to crawl around this joint.” It’s so totally Pink it should be
trademarked. Funny and evocative, it gets its point home with force and humour.
I must admit, Pink saying that she and her followers are “better than the
masses” is highly ironic, given her near-universal appeal and the fact that her
fans are the masses she’s dumping on.
Still, she knows it’s all crap, on one level, and “we’re all followin’ our
asses” adds a welcome note of humility and we’re-all-full-of-shit levity. Pink
is looking for a communal experience in her art, and her fans, and humanity in
general, and the lack of any we-are-all-one understanding is doing her head in.
Better get used to it, Pink. Change is not coming anytime soon.
Sorry, that’s just the cynic in me talking. Not entirely convincingly.
Blow Me (One Last Kiss) comes next:
Great wee song, tiny Modest Mouse nibbles through it. Great title, too – a masculine insult (“blow me,” or “suck my dick”) with its meaning turned on its head by the part of the title in paragraphs: “One last kiss,” as in “blow me a kiss.” The song is about her relationship with her husband and muse Carey Hart, whom she has been with now for 20 years, married for 15 of them.
Even if it’s not, it reads like it is. Her relationship with the biker is so famous, so on-off, and has been a part of most of her adult life, that any me-vs-he-vs-she songs inevitably come off as being about their fighting. The song title, an angry insult and a bitter spit on frustrated sorta-failed romance, could almost be their matrimonial template laid bare in just a few words. And then:
“I think that life’s too short for this
Want back my ignorance and bliss”
I am a total sucker for phrases rearranged and out into a different context, so I love “ignorance is bliss” being twisted and turned and shredded here. The song topped the charts here in Scotland, and that totally fits: Scottish women are hard as nails, taking no shit from anybody, but also have soft centres under all the fire and bluff and bluster, untapped honey rivers ready to be dipped into for the right person with the right word and heart combo to offer.
“No more sick whiskey dick
No more battles for me
You’ll be calling a trick
‘Cause you no longer sleep
I’ll dress nice, I’ll look good,
I’ll go dancing alone
I will laugh, I’ll get drunk
I’ll take somebody home”
Ah, Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned, eh? The female jealousy-making tactic, the oldest one in the book. I mean, the CD single cover even looks like a retro porno poster:
“There’s a waltz playin’ frozen in time
Blades of grass on tiny bare feet
I look at you and you’re lookin’ at me”
Well, just back away sadly. I do think songs like this, that operate on a frequency that men can’t quite get (if their partner loses a child, men still don’t have a physical part of themselves die, no matter how painful it might be for them), are a large part of Pink’s appeal to the average woman. Nobody has the guts to sing about stuff like this.
The only other song I can think of about this subject – though there may well be others – is June by Idles, when the singer Joe Talbot’s daughter was stillborn. And that one’s too painful to listen to as well. Some songs just make you feel like a grief and trauma voyeur, and Beam Me Up certainly does that for me.
Meanwhile, skipping forward like a record needle over old faulty vinyl, we get to Slut Like You, an absolute crass classic:
To a blastoff beat that sounds uncannily like Song 2 by Blur, Pink snorts, in a ditzy, goofy, foolish voice, “I’m not a slut, I just love love,” which is a line I love to love. She then goes on to tell us how she’s a slut. Maybe the first line was left over from an initial take of the song. Or maybe she’s taking the piss like a catheter tube in the slutty (if such a thing even exists; some folk just fuck more than others) self-justification stakes.
In best feminist mode, Pink deftly, poetically and hilarious satirises knuckledragger drunk men and their views on women, turning them right round and letting them look at themselves in the cracked foggy coke-smeared mirror. She and her friends have gone out to get drenched in a club, maybe get laid. The vocab she uses during the song’s dancing and running time is pure sexist male prick, only with the singer grabbing her crotch this time, and finding there a clitdick bigger than any of the guys she would regard as her “little friend” (a Scarface ref) were she to take them home for “a little taste test.”
“Sitting with my friends
And we’re picking who we might let in (that one?)
Them boys are starving”
The eagle-eyed prick-picking party girls are on the case. I do love how Pink sings that stanza, in a bad, cheesy English accent. I would imagine her fake transatlantic brogue is a trait left over from the lingering psychic aftertraces left by English singer Lily Allen, who appears elsewhere on the album, on the song True Love.
“You don’t win a prize with your googly eyes
I’m not a cracker jack
You can’t go inside
Unless I let you Jack – ha, or Sam
Fuck, what’s your name again?
You, male, come, now
You, caveman, sit down
You, shhh, don’t ruin it, wow
Check, please!”
I have to say, this is absolutely one of my all-time fave lyrics, and pieces of music in general; it’s all just in the way the rap-inspired lyrics, Pink’s drunk mocking spoken-word voice, and the loud thumping music flow together like tongue-loosening firewater. Pure magic.
That carefully-crafted piece of subtly sculpted dialogue really is beautiful. It never fails to make me laugh, the way-she rap-sings it. I could listen to a whole album full of stuff like this. It’s real feminism, too, showing that women can be just as stupidly lustful and dismissively drunkenly sexist (‘caveman,’ ‘shh’) as men – indeed, sometimes even more so.
Unlike a man, though, Pink (or the character she’s playing, though her use of the first person really makes us identify the protagonist as her) is getting what she wants, and you know she is. Her identifying herself with a Cracker Jack, a sweet, savoury American junk food that comes with a cheap, crap prize in the box, is a bonus too. It’s an odd comparison, but it works, and in art that’s all that matters.
Speaking of one night stands, I want to have a wee blether about Walk of Shame next:
“One step, two steps
Counting tiles on the floor
Three steps, four steps
Guess this means that I’m a whore
Uh-oh Hell no
How long ‘til I reach the door
Fuck me, my feet are sore
I’m wearing last night’s dress
And I look like a hot ass mess
Although my hair looks good
‘Cause I haven’t slept yet!”
I am chuckling here. Pink starts off by using the old maths rhyme used for counting, “one step, two steps” in measuring out her next-morning debauchery, which is hilarious. She hasn’t had a wink of sleep because she’s been up all night being stroked and stretched by a stranger, in a song which could be the flipside of Slut Like You:
“Okay now raise two hands
If you’ve ever been guilty
And clap clap clap clap clap it out
If you’ve walked with me”
Yep, guilty grin, clap clap clap clap clap with two hands raised.
They left me here with too much beer
My friends, they hung me out to dry
It’s not my fault and that’s why
I’m doin’ the walk of shame”
I do love the double meaning of the pun “hung me out to dry,” i.e. her friends leaving her when she needed help, but also leaving her because she needed to dry out before driving home. I guess some of this is pretty obvious stuff, to some, but I like discussing it, so ho-hum. And then that last one wee eccentric joke at the end:
“So walk this way (we’re walking, were walking)
Walk this way (we’re walking, we’re walking)
In Los Angeles, where Pink lives, “We’re walking” is what is said by the machinery at traffic lights to let blind people to know the lights are at red and they can cross safely. Sticking that in there is just totally fucking hilarious, and smart as Hell.
I am breaking this in two, so your bruised brain doesn't break down at reading all this. and Part 2 can be found here:
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