PINK - Seeing Red

Bashing airhead celebrities

Although “Dear Mr. President” attracted some attention, it was nothing like the controversy that surrounded “Stupid Girls,” in which the singer blasted the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. “When I was in high school if you were a slut it was bad news,” she told MTV in 2008. “Now, if you have a sex tape you’re cool. That’s so gross to me and unfortunate.”  She says she wrote the song in response to a popular culture being taken over by the tabloids, where women who dumb-down get all the attention. It is a scathing attack. She was angry at the lack of positive role models for young girls, with women only appearing on the front pages because of their latest boob job, shoe purchase, or arrest charge.

The lyrics are inspired. “What happened to the dreams of a girl president/She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent.” And then later on in the song, “I’m so glad that I’ll never fit in/That will never be me/Outcasts and girls with ambition/That’s what I wanna see.” She wanted her fans to understand that they can make their own decisions and choices in life. “Once you figure out what respect tastes like, it tastes better than attention. But you have to get there,” she told the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. The song’s words are powerful and insightful, but it was the video that really attracted the most reaction. In it Pink lampoons empty-headed celebrities by driving while applying her lipstick. She runs over a pedestrian and then proceeds to check that her makeup is still perfect. There is also a scene in which she sticks a toothbrush down her throat to mimic bulimia. Several Hollywood noses were put out of joint.

A strong voice

Like her hero Madonna, Pink is a strong woman who plays by her own rules, and she has an uncanny habit of alienating authority. How many pop stars do you know who would berate Prince William for hunting animals? She was invited to perform at his twenty-first birthday bash, but turned it down and challenged him over his views. “I was happy to hear that I was your first choice to play at your twenty-first birthday bash—then disgusted to learn that you hunt animals for fun and that you purposely rammed a spear through a tiny deer in Africa.” She has also written to the Queen asking her why the bearskins of the Buckingham Palace guards couldn’t be made out of a synthetic material. Although a spokesman for the prince denied that the deer incident ever took place, the singer has yet to receive any replies from Buckingham Palace, which she publicly declared was “a bit rude.”

Pink is a vegetarian and a high profile campaigner for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and has lent her voice to many of their campaigns, including protests against Kentucky Fried Chicken. At one of her concerts in Paris she called for an international boycott of the Australian wool industry for a practice known as mulesing that involves skin being taken from a sheep’s buttocks to reduce the incidence of parasitic diseases. She also suggested to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, that she run anti-fur ads in her magazine. The request was declined.

A lifelong animal lover, Pink also works behind the scenes for PETA, writing to companies and individuals she believes are exploiting animals, such as KFC and Siegfried and Roy. And she’s not shy about criticizing fellow performers such as Beyoncé for wearing fur. She also called Kanye West an “idiot” for saying that there should be more fur on display at a fashion show he attended.