Attached above are the original studio release and accompanying video, classified as “electronic dance music” for chart purposes, and the recent live performance at the DNC, which doesn’t sound at all like something composed with carefree dancing in mind.
Maybe you’re not as much of a political junkie as me, and didn’t tune in to the final night of the Democratic National Convention, in which case, whoo boy, you missed a hell of a fine performance by Pink, just belting it out in a female vocal ensemble that included her thirteen year old daughter Willow, whose clear, sweet delivery, sounding so like her mother’s, must have put listeners in mind of the old adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’m not bashful about admitting that it got me right in the pumper. They delivered it with conviction, and I found it surprisingly moving, jaded, sneering, cynical snark merchant though I’m touted to be.
It’s all just politics, right? Except this time, and for a while now, it’s not just politics, is it?
If it was, then Pink, a thinking person’s sort of pop star and nobody’s shill, wouldn’t be putting her shoulder to the wheel at a partisan political event. She’s ready to do that now because there’s too much at stake to affect any sort of cool, disinterested detachment, not when yet again, it’s the most important f’ing election of our lifetimes. There’s no morality in sitting on the sidelines. It’s a time for choosing which team you’re on, and Pink isn’t about to choose MAGA.
That said, being nobody’s shill means she’s no shill for the Dems either, and the DNC’s decision to let her perform a piece like What About Us?, a passionate, bitter, altogether disillusioned indictment of the entire political process, and the long-standing failure of political leaders to live up to their avowed commitment to improve ordinary peoples’ lives, was a pretty brave one. Maybe the party faithful hear it as a protest against Trump and Trumpism, but the song needn’t be interpreted as a slam against only the Republican Party. Not at all. The whole system, whoever happens to inhabit the White House, and whichever party happens to control Congress, has all too often proved itself incapable of delivering the outcomes that the governed both need and desire. There are, of course, all sorts of factors that contribute to this ongoing disappointment, a lot of them built into the framework of America’s ludicrously anti-democratic, slave-state-appeasing constitution, and no reasonable person could insist upon any sort of moral equivalence between America’s two political parties, or the policies they pursue; but still. The ordinary citizen hears the promises, trudges to the polls hoping against hope that maybe this time it’ll be different, and while sometimes it is, if only a little – I’d argue that the Biden administration did as much to help ordinary Americans as it possibly could within such a fucked-up constitutional framework – it’s never really enough, and the hard-won gains are always tenuous.
You can feel it. Pink isn’t there just to boost Kamala, and bury Trump. She’s issuing a challenge to the room around her. She’s speaking to the candidates. This time, don’t put the lie to your lofty rhetoric, and have the guts to do what it takes to be on our side.
Watching Pink on stage with her child, I really felt that now, at this sorely needed moment of hope, it’s possible to believe in a better future.
Maybe this time.
the needlefish 