Rock summer hits Intro to the topic of the month: P!NK - A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SOMEONE ELSE / in ENGLISH
Rock Summer Hits Intro to the topic of the month:
P!NK - A DAY IN THE LIFE OF SOMEONE ELSE / in ENGLISH
I have already written articles about some performers for whom their colours are very important for the appearance on the rock scene. At Green Day it's more kind of a joke and after a lot of searches I realized that "green day" probably means the day spent in smoking pot. (I can't claim for anyone of the rock stars that everything about them is truth and nothing but the truth. Everything I know about them I have read, listened to and sometimes seen from distance at a concert, and just remember how many showbizz stars, especially the actors, invented their life story as an entire fake myth about themselves.) However, at Pink I can undoubtedly say that the question of colour as her trademark is really important. "Her true colours shinin' thru" much more seriously, that she even make them stylized with an exclamation point instead of letter „I“. Excellent, and unobtrusive marketing trick, bravo P!nk, first point for you!
As a teenager in Philadelphia, Alecia Moore desperately wanted to make a musical career, as a way out of her unfortunate, personal life, marked by the divorce of her parents and teenage inability to cope with the situation of the separate life. About it, she sings very autobiographically the song "Family Portrait", almost like a confession. She tried then any musical genre from punk to the R'n'B, until her music producer advised her to change her image, from sweet to aggressive girl, to go solo, dye her hair and take the stage name for Steve Buscemi's Mr. Pink from Tarantino's film "Reservoir Dogs". Producer's name is Antonio "LA" Reid from LaFace Records, and he's the one to blame for everything. (This guy is that L.A. who tells her in that song that she's going to be a pop star, while I was naively thinking that's what another L.A. told her, that one she was dreaming of. :) Second point for you.)
Yes, I can imagine Alecia Moore singing R'n'B trying to be the another Beyonce, but I can't imagine P!nk to sing that what is completely contrary to her public image.
In any case, Alecia, as a promising but not yet famous singer, has taken the biggest and crucial risk in her musical career. Driving her bosses crazy, P!nk has completely changed her style and from the R'n'B cutie on the first album "Can't Take Me Home" she became a punk rebel on the second album "Missundaztood". Despite warnings from the record company professionals who supported her career and claimed that it's not good to change something radical, its debut R'n'B album was sold well on the market. After all, these bosses can go to hell, they're just employers who care about their invested money, but THEY don't sing these songs, SHE does it. „Missundaztood“ is that album with the hits like "Just Like A Pill", "Don't Let me Get me", "Get The Party Started", "Family Portrait"... - and after that Alecia Moore aka P!nk has become the legend that we all know. On this album she sings clearly and loudly, even to someone who barely understands English, that she is tired of taking morphine, tired of being another Britney Spears, that she wants to run away from all that and finally begs the doctor to prescribe her medicine, a day in life of someone else.So, dear readers that's official version of the life story of Philadelphia's singer P!nk about her mythical transformation "from white swan to ugly duckling". All right, maybe whole that story in the way how P!nk and Antonio Reid tell it today isn't quite true, maybe it's just a fairy tale in reverse direction, but as a life story of success, I'll admit that it sounds great to me as well. Good enough for lessons of marketing.
Moreover that verse about the "day spent in a life of someone else" from her song "Don't Let Me Get me" also influenced on me in a very literal way. It inspired me in my futuristic novel "Shengzian Oparamun" where at one point the main character takes over someone else's gained life experience in his own consciousness in a risky way, and then thinks about what might happen to him. There's even another symbolic connection to this American singer. In my novel the antagonist of the main hero likes to wear pink glasses through which he is looking the whole world around him in pink, therefore positively.
Yet, here is a small semantic difference between Croatian and English, that I didn't know before translating the novel from Croatian to English. What the phrase "looking life through ROSE coloured glasses" means in English (La vie en rose) in Croatian it is literally written like "looking life through PINK coloured glasses".
After all, it seems to me that the pop music scene everywhere in the world is intentionally built as a bridge between two shores, two extremes and the musicians who don't want to align themselves with any of those sides, but want to stay somewhere in the middle where their music taste is, they will never become successful stars, probably not even esteemed artists.
On one side of the bridge there are all beautiful and happy Beyoncés of this world. In their songs, they tell us that in life, the only thing that matters is to find love and happiness. Okay, we love them, but we don't like them very much, because it all seems kind of fake and artificial. Very far from our average, unsuccessful and alienated life. Such performers are of course the most successful, because they have heart and soul for us little, ordinary people, and the multimillion sale figures of their albums finally say that (almost) everyone wants to experience this fairy tale, whether it's true or false. That's why there is pop music for you. For the same reason as Hollywood romantic movie with a happy ending. Do you ever wonder why you actually want to see the next sequel of Tom & Maggie romance, if you've already seen in that first movie everything that's going to happen in this one, again? Of course you don't really care about the dramatic quality of the story and the script, but you simply want to re-live that happiness and satisfaction in an acted way, convincingly enough.On the other side of the bridge there are all angry and rebellious P!nks of this world. These are the performers who protest against this imposed system, the show business industry that always pushes forward an idyllic and more or less fake portrait of life as something heavenly beautiful, because the whole entertainment industry can live well from such portrait. These other, angry rebels tell us in their songs that in life it's better to be honest, to have an attitude and to tell the truth to everyone in the face, instead of living that false "Hollywood portrait" of love and happiness. („Honesty, such a lonely word...“ no one says it more precisely than Billy Joel.) These latter performers, "rebels with attitude" never sell so many albums and CDs like these former, because they have an angry attitude instead of heart and soul. Considerably smaller sale figures of their albums confirm that we LOVE them a lot LESS, but that's why we ADORE them much MORE. And it's not a paradox at all. They are in fact a constant hope for us, with their "fight against the system", that something can be changed in this conservative world of entertainment industry. Industry which didn't change at all, neither by taste nor technology, since 50-es of the 20th century, time when the top-charts of the popularity of songs were introduced.
After all, the music industry that stands behind both kinds of performers always has the same goal, the profit, and if that first is an acted happiness, isn't that second an acted rebelliousness? Therefore, it should disregard personal taste and preferences, is should build a bridge to the other side. That bridge should come to the other audience, the other extreme and it should create an "opposition" to those sweet and eternally happy pop stars, opposition made from angry and eternally dissatisfied rockers. Those who are revolting and criticising all that is bad in society, "for they are not in power". I wonder how much they would change if they actually get power? Look at Mick Jagger, who was once commercially advertised as a "rebel against the system". Today he is happy and contented conservative after Brexit won.
Final question. You know all about her and if P!nk was a capitalist corporation, she would be:
a) Hollywood Reporter
b) Red Bull
c) Victoria's Secret
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Igor Suljagić (@IgorSuljagic) | Twitter
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