High-flying Pink skipped pop princess and now soars as music royalty
You can tell a concert tour is admirably sustaining itself when it runs long enough to cover the release cycle of two albums.
That’s the undoubtedly welcome predicament facing global pop phenomenon Pink this spring. Her current tour is named after the 2017 studio recording “Beautiful Trauma,” a work that spawned four hits, earned a Grammy nomination and sent the often-acrobatic singer on the road over a year ago for a performance run that is still going strong.
Here’s the thing, though. Pink’s “Beautiful Trauma Tour” has actually outlasted the hefty commercial appeal of the “Beautiful Trauma” album – so much so that her newest studio record, “Hurts 2B Human,” was issued barely a week ago. In short, a tour designed to promote one record is now covering a second one, as well.
What does that tell us? Well, to start with, it affirms the notion many carry that Pink is perhaps the most popular and influential female pop artist to maintain a consistently visible and bankable career across multiple decades since Madonna. The comparison between the two, of course, ends there. Madonna was about reinvention and image. Pink is about immediacy and affirmation.
As for her contemporaries, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were more prominently marketable pop presences by playing the sex card whenever the distinction in their songs stalled. Pink largely bypassed that strategy and wound up outlasting both of them.
As she edges toward her 40th birthday this fall, Pink has emerged as a performer that can pretty much do it all.
She can create songs that exude personal strength and independence, celebrate melodies that move to decidedly modern but earnest grooves and fashion performances where this mother of two takes to the air in true Peter Pan fashion.
“This is the life of a well-adjusted veteran star who’s not quite sure how she’s survived this long and stayed this sane,” wrote Joe Coscarelli in a 2017 New York Times profile of Pink. “A vestige of the Y2K, peak-CD, MTV ‘TRL’ generation, Pink hasn’t melted down or ever really gone away, a fact she owes to never having been ‘the one.’”
Lexington got an early performance look at Pink before she was anywhere close to being “the one.” She first played Rupp in June 2000 as a mostly unknown opening act for the then-ravenously popular ‘N Sync. But the anonymity was short lived. Within a few short months, her Kevin “She’kspere” Briggs written and produced single “There You Go” became a Top 10 hit. Within a year, Pink’s debut album “Can’t Take Me Home” went double platinum. Within two more years, her sophomore album “Missundaztood” would amass worldwide sales in excess of 12 million copies.
In other words, Pink had struck gold.
Listen back to those early records and what you hear were reflections of the dance-pop sounds of the day forged under the tutelage of then-fashionable producers like Babyface (Kenneth Edmonds) and L.A. Reid. But as the years passed, the grooves evened out and a stronger lyrical conscience emerged in Pink’s songs – well, that and a whole lot of personal assertion.
There is a reason Pink titled her fourth album “I’m Not Dead.” At a point (in this instance, 2006) when most careers attuned to the pop sounds of the day were experiencing increasingly shorter commercial shelf lives, Pink let her own presence roar.
The hits didn’t just continue, they got bigger, more frequent and favored more of her artistic presence than those of her famed producers.
A brilliant case in point came at the 2010 Grammy Awards telecast when Pink walked through the audience singing her stoically graceful “Glitter in the Air” before hopping aboard a silk trapeze with three other dancers to conclude the song in a jaw-dropping display that was half aerial ballet and half “Flashdance.” She went airborne again at the Grammys in 2014 with the affirmative pop anthem “Try.” Since then, taking literal flight during concerts has become standard operating procedure for Pink.
Of course, the singer also does just fine back on earth. Her 2013 power ballad duet with Fun frontman Nate Ruess, “Just Give Me a Reason,” became a hit in over 20 countries as well as her fourth No. 1 single in the United States.
Now we come to where “Beautiful Trauma” is giving way to “Hurts 2B Human.” The latter is a record rooted far less in commercial pageantry and more in personal assessment. One of its strongest songs (and, in fact, one of Pink’s most revealing works to date) is “Circle Game.” Though named after one of Joni Mitchell’s most cherished songs, Pink’s composition is a plain-speaking and quietly moving tribute to her father that contrasts the needs and bonds of successive generations.
Kentucky audiences, though, are bound to flock to “Love Me Anyway,” a duet with homegrown hero Chris Stapleton that places a story of unadorned country heartbreak within the frame of a lean pop ballad.
“I’ve never won the popularity contest,” Pink told the New York Times. “I was never as big as Britney or Christina. If you look at any paragraph about pop music, I don’t get mentioned. My name doesn’t come up. And yet, here I go again, right under the wave, duck-diving.”
If you go: Pink/Julia Michaels
When: 7:30 p.m. May 9
Where: Rupp Arena, 430 W. Vine
Tickets: $32.45-$298
Call: 859-233-3535, 800-745-3000
Online: rupparena.com, pinkspage.com
This story was originally published May 3, 2019 at 7:00 AM.