Somewhere, on some radio, a P!nk song is playing—that’s been true for the past 20 years. She opened for NSYNC, then outlasted them; she wrote a surprisingly delicate anti-Bush ballad with the Indigo Girls, and her career outlasted that presidency; she collaborated with the lead singer of the now obsolete band fun. at the height of its popularity, in a song that still gets radio play; she wore giant sunglasses and mimed jabbing a toothbrush down her throat to mock the Paris Hilton archetype of female celebrity, and stayed relevant longer than both Hilton and anti-Hilton backlash. P!nk’s music oscillates between self-destruction and self-compassion, a balance she’s struck since her breakout album M!ssndazstood in 2001. After a litany of brash statements and cries for help, optimized for shock value (“Teachers dated me/My parents hated me”), she builds to a plea: “I’m a hazard to myself/Don’t let me get me.” On an album that strained to prove how dangerous or damaged or derailed the 22-year-old singer was—all dirty socks and diamond rings, extended metaphors describing her childhood as “my Vietnam”—“Don’t Let Me Get Me” was the song that stunned. There’s always a sudden softness in her party tracks, or a raw, brazen aside in her ballads.
P!nk is architecting her legacy now, and the industry is celebrating her for sticking around. On Sunday, Billboard gave her its “Icon” award, days after Amazon released a documentary, P!nk: All I Know So Far, following the massive 2019 European tour behind her 2017 album Beautiful Trauma. In recent years, P!nk has become known as a live entertainer, performing stunts and singing through elaborate acrobatic routines. The film focuses on her decision to bring her two young kids with her as she practiced and performed; they flail in the background of her rehearsals, diaper-clad and puffing on a trumpet backstage. “I want tour to be perfect for every single person that walks through those doors with a ticket in their hand,” P!nk says at one point, “but I also want it to be perfect in my kids’ minds. And I kill myself to do both.”
That strain hovers over the film’s accompanying live album, which leaves out some of P!nk’s more potent songs and instead asserts her place in a punk-adjacent musical canon, arguing that motherhood is fundamentally compatible with her watered-down brand of rebellion. All I Know So Far: Setlist is crammed with rock covers, some more successful than others. She braids a stomping version of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” into a performance of her 2008 track “Funhouse,” which both tamps down the absurdity of P!nk’s metaphors (“This used to be a funhouse/But now it’s filled with evil clowns”) and highlights Gwen Stefani’s clear influence. Less thrilling is her take on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which sags under the weight of ceremony without adding much to the original.
As a performer, P!nk is fun and brash and loose. “I forget the words,” she murmurs on the recording of her Nate Ruess collaboration, the sappy mallcore duet “Just Give Me a Reason.” “Screw that,” she says, and asks for a do-over. “I like that song.” She bounces on and off the beat on “Who Knew,” spilling over the song’s boundaries, and in the disarray the lyrics become disarming—“I’ll keep you locked in my head,” she whimpers, “until we meet again.” When she belts, her usually raspy voice scrapes at the notes, sometimes quivering with emotion. “I’m alright,” she cries on “So What,” convincing herself in real time, “I’m just fiiine.” On “Just Like a Pill,” one of the best songs she’s written, the audience rushes in to fill the gaps when she pauses; the recording becomes a document of this joint need, artist and audience working in tandem to cement a narrative of endurance.
The narrative P!nk wants to tell is that she’s a “renegade,” as she cooes on the title track—a new addition for the album, rooted in female empowerment—and that she’s stayed ahead of the times. But in reality P!nk is less revolutionary; she’s updated her music and her message in ways that seem both heartfelt and primed for mass appeal. The album includes her viral 2017 acceptance speech for the MTV Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, somewhat jarringly slotted after a series of live songs, and in it she recalls talking to her then-six-year-old daughter about the toxicity of beauty standards and the freedom in androgyny. The applause fades into the next track, a blaring EDM beat from Cash Cash thumping under snippets from P!nk’s past interviews—“I need to know my pain is helping your pain,” she says, as the beat wheezes and drops. The messaging shows up on the album’s new songs, which seem less like anthems for the downtrodden and more like vessels for the statements P!nk wants to make now. At the Billboard award show, she and her nine-year-old daughter hung suspended in the air as they performed “Cover Me in Sunshine.” Guitar played somewhere offscreen, a low, forgettable strum. They twirled above the stage and chirped about “good times.” P!nk swung toward her daughter and their foreheads pressed together. It’s one of the weakest songs of her career; it may also mean the most.
Buy: Rough Trade
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