PINK: She's good for the kids. |
Full disclosure: I'm not a die hard Pink fan. I haven’t spilled 1641 words on a review of her second album M!ssundaztood, nor did I bother buying her new I’m Not Dead (La Face) before checking out her sold-out show at Avalon on Tuesday. In fact, some of her songs — see I'm Not Dead's UK bonus track "Centerfold" — make me want to stab a chop stick through my ear, step in front of a slow moving train, ingest a steaming pile of bile.Why, you ask, does she inspire in me the occasional death wish? Well, for the same reason I don't like her contemporaries — the same contemporaries from which she so desperately tries to distance herself. It's the songwriting, which sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, relying too heavily on cliché when she should be allowing her goofball quirks to do the talking. But I have a grudging respect for her. I like the idea that there’s someone in the pop factory willing to sabotage the pudding. And I actually do think Pink is good for the kids. Not because of her frequent promotion of female empowerment (X-tina and Kelly Clarkson do that, too), I'm talking root-vegetable healthy. Some parents may have found Pink’s approach on her single “Stupid Girls” crude at times, but the fact remains that it has inspired debate in a way that an entire album’s worth of Natasha Bedingfield songs could not.
I was rooting for the tots to come out — partly because I think that they could learn a thing or two from Pink, but also because I was hoping to catch a few of them running around the club in I'm Not Dead tour t-shirts. While these shirts do in fact exist — they were being sold at the singer's merch booth — there were very few being worn by the children last night. In fact, there were far fewer youngsters last night than I had originally expected. Just exactly who were these people who showed up in droves for the Pink gig, if not tots and young teens? Everybody. You name it, Avalon had it: dykes, gays, muscle-bound heteros, backward-hats seemingly on break from the baseball game across the street, bespectacled middle aged males, dumpy looking middle aged males with enormous beer guts (okay, maybe just that one guy), grandmothers, moms and daughters, moms without daughters. Perhaps most striking of all attendees was the guy in the L7 shirt camped out in front of the sound booth with his little riot grrrl at his side (say aww).
Pink made Kay Hanley's steaming hot pop show at TT's the other night seem small by comparison. Donning a black suit and dark shades, she came out swinging her microphone stand suggestively as her band — three women, one African American male, a Michael Bolton look-alike on guitar, one inconspicuous male drummer — laid down the groove to " 'Cuz I Can." She promptly shed the suit and shades for Try This's (Arista) "Trouble," which was funny because it’s a Tim Armstrong song with a guitar solo by a guy who looks like Michael Bolton. "Who Knew" seemed to go over well, even though it flopped as a radio single. It's overwrought, that's for damn sure — with Pink belting "If someone said three years from now/You'd be long gone/I'd stand up and punch them out/…I know better/Cause you said forever" over bloated guitars and weepy violins (though on this night the violins were absent) — but come on, how many Pink songs can you name that aren't? The band went big yet again for "Just Like A Pill" and the crowd cheered as Pink fell to the floor for what I can only guess was a simulation of a drug overdose.
Actually, the band went power-ballad on just about everything last night. And therein lies my biggest complaint: aside from the odd "Family Portrait," most every song got very, very predictable. "I'm Not Dead" is a stunning pop song, but after you've heard " 'Cuz I Can," "Just Like A Pill," "Who Knew," and "18 Wheeler," it fails to kick quite as high. Luckily, "Dear Mr. President" in the encore was altogether brilliant, prefaced by a fun little story about a Kansas City audience that folded their arms but couldn't resist singing along to it. Pink and company grabbed seats for the performance before singing in a three-part harmony that belied the cut’s gritty subject matter. (It may be worth noting that together Pink and her singing partners onstage for that song — her keyboardist and backup singer — vaguely resembled the pop star's ideological cousins, the Dixie Chicks.) As if to lighten the mood, Pink closed with "Get The Party Started" during which came the kicker: a father emerged from the crowd prematurely, his dazed little girl at his side with her fingers plugged into her ear holes. Growing up's a bitch, ain't it?
