She may be the latest in a long line of cynically crafted pop starlets, but the influence of angst-queen Pink is more wholesome than that of the cheerleaders of the recent past, writes Dorian Lynskey
The scene is a typical US high school, every ingredient familiar from any teen movie. Britney Spears prances down a brightly lit corridor, shirt tied above her pancake-flat midriff, leading her classmates in a display of wholesome, high-kicking, let's-do-the-show-right-here pizzazz. Elsewhere, in a graffiti-smeared locker room, tattooed misfit Alecia "Pink" Moore screams into the mirror as glossy-haired Stepford students look on contemptuously. You can't imagine the two would ever share a canteen table.
If you had only eight minutes in which to explain how teen-pop has changed in the past three years, you would simply have to play the two videos from which these scenes are taken: Britney's Baby One More Time (1999) and Pink's Don't Let Me Get Me (2002). In pop's high-school hierarchy, Britney is the cheerleader, the prom queen, The Girl Most Likely To, while Pink is the outcast with "issues". Now, though, the traditional order of things has been turned on its head. At the end of her video, Pink returns to her hated alma mater to play a show and is cheered by the new intake of students. In effect, that is exactly what has happened.
"You could make the case right now that Pink is the most influential person in music," says Craig Marks, editor of US magazine Blender. "Eminem is such an anomaly that he hasn't really led to anyone else, but there's undoubtedly more like Pink to come." Two years ago, Pink was just another R&B singer, notable only for the colour of her skin, a bad temper and a pack-a-day cigarette habit. Her record label, Arista, pitched her as a mildly unorthodox teen-pop star, sending her out on tour with boy-band titans N'Sync. But for her second album, M!ssundaztood, Pink demanded creative control. She called up Linda Perry, formerly of grunge bandwagon-jumpers 4 Non Blondes, and began writing songs about low self-esteem and her parents' divorce, a topic gruellingly detailed on her new single, Family Portrait. At the time it was widely regarded as a risky move, and the first single was the atypically upbeat Let's Get the Party Started, but the subsequent success of Don't Let Me Get Me - which drew the battle lines by snarling, "Don't compare me to damn Britney Spears" - marked a genuine sea change.
Seven million worldwide sales of M!ssundaztood later, the cultural impact of the 23-year-old from blue-collar Philadelphia is clear. Two weeks ago she won best female solo artist at the Smash Hits Poll Winners' Party, the reliable weather-vane of tweenie tastes, and graced the cover of the Face magazine. This unusual double whammy demonstrates the breadth of Pink's appeal, but it is the former accolade that really sets record-company cash tills ringing. Among 13-year-olds, pop tastes are largely gender-specific, and nu metal remains predominately a boy thing. Pink's popularity has identified a lucrative and untapped market: teenage girls who may have liked Britney three years ago but now have a taste for low-key rebellion, the Osbournes and boys with tattoos.
They are also the audience for another seven-million-selling Arista signing, 17-year-old Canadian Avril Lavigne, who appropriates skate-punk chic without frightening the horses. "I am careful not to swear in my lyrics," she told Smash Hits recently. "I'd feel kind of guilty because I would be disappointing my parents." Meanwhile, in the pop equivalent of an MP defecting to a rival party, Christina Aguilera has traded in coy romance for Linda Perry and broken homes on her new album, Stripped. In interviews, Aguilera appears so disgusted by her former image, you fear she'll go back to the Florida Disney club that spawned her (not to mention Britney and Justin Timberlake) and burn it to the ground.
There is more to this than the general ebb and flow of pop trends. For one thing, teen-pop fans grow up fast these days.
The prepubescent tweenager who wears a boob tube and aspires to be Britney is likely to encounter body-image issues and teenage angst earlier than her older sister did, and will want music reflecting that.
"We're more than ever exposed to celebrity and beauty, and aware of it at an earlier age," says Matt Mason, deputy editor of Smash Hits. "And I think Pink is a good thing in that respect. Some of our readers would find it difficult to believe they could ever be as flawlessly beautiful as Holly Valance, but they look at someone like Pink and think, I could be like that. The letters we get from Pink fans say: 'She really says something to me about my life'." There is also the question of a change in America's mood. Before September 11th 2001 and the stock market crash, Britney and her ilk provided the soundtrack to an ebullient nation. Now there is an appetite for music that acknowledges darker truths.
"Money was falling from the sky when teen pop was so huge," says Craig Marks. "Everything was hunky-dory here. Perhaps Pink caught the shift in cultural winds when she decided not to be quite so chipper." Thus authenticity, or at least the appearance of it, is now more fashionable than artifice. In an ingenious move, Pink incorporated her initial creative clashes with Arista's LA Reid into the lyrics of Don't Let Me Get Me: "LA told me, you'll be a pop star/All you have to change is everything you are." Reid played along, posing in the video as a stereotypically unctuous, cigar-toting mogul.
But Pink's presentation of herself as a fearless artist battling the corporate machine should be taken with a pinch of salt. Whatever his initial misgivings, Reid was smart enough to spot a hit. "It's not necessarily risky to mess with a formula if you feel that the formula is over," says Marks.
Nonetheless, Pink and Reid deserve credit for shaking up the conservative world of teen pop. Far less admirable are the numerous wannabes waiting in the wings. In August, the New York Times ran a profile of aspiring singer Amanda Latona in order to examine how pop careers are constructed. Over the course of the piece, her look and mannerisms morphed blatantly from Britney's to Pink's. She already has her own nail polish, Pandemonium.
"If I could put myself into a colour, it would be a rockin' shade of red," she claims on her website, instantly earning the opprobrium of any right-thinking music fan. Another newcomer, Aimee Allen, writes her name using the symbol for anarchy and has called her début single Revolution. Will it be an incendiary punk-rock call to storm the barricades of Bush's America, or as faux-radical as a Che Guevara T-shirt in a high-street boutique? Place your bets.
It is impossible for older listeners not to raise a cynical eyebrow at the prospect of starlets clutching guitars and a brand-new copy of Nirvana's Greatest Hits while downplaying the fact that their parents are happily married and have a house with a pool in Long Island. And yet such a change is long overdue. If the average musically inclined 13-year-old girl feels compelled to take guitar lessons rather than dance classes, and measures herself against Pink or Kelly Osbourne rather than some perma-grinning, hard-bodied Lolita, some good will come of it. The prom queens won't be missed.
- Guardian News Service
Pink's new single, Family Portrait, is on Arista