Pink 2006: Get the Intimate Gathering Started

Pink at 9:30 -- let's just call her our little secret. (By Michael Temchine For The Washington Post)

Pity poor Pink.

Once she was seemingly poised to become the new Madonna, but now the saucy pop singer's career prospects have been severely downgraded: At the age of 26, Pink -- who performed Sunday at the 9:30 club -- is almost threatening to become the new Meredith Brooks.

You remember Meredith Brooks, right? Oh, you don't? My point exactly.

In a just world, Pink would be a superstar, an A-list artist with an outrageously high Q rating. Her imaginative, eclectic dance-rock albums would be surefire bestsellers, her latest smartly crafted singles and ringtones every bit as inescapable as her blockbuster 2001 hit, "Get the Party Started."

She would perform her tuneful songs on arena stages in front of massive, adoring crowds that couldn't get enough of her swagger, sass and abundant charisma. Her stage name (if not her birth name, Alecia Moore) would roll off the tongue as often and easily as Beyonce's, Gwen's, Mariah's, Madonna's. She might even have her own clothing line.

But a world in which James Blunt, Rascal Flatts and the cast of Disney's "High School Musical" soundtrack are the top-selling artists of 2006 isn't necessarily just, and so Pink has been relegated to underdog status as she follows her fickle muse around the margins of pop's mainstream.

Most recently, the singer embarked on a modest, small-venue tour in support of a new album, "I'm Not Dead," which needs all the support it can get. Whereas Pink's first two CDs (2000's "Can't Take Me Home" and 2001's blockbuster "Missundaztood") sold nearly 8 million copies between them as Pink set herself apart from the turn-of-the-millennium pack, "I'm Not Dead" hasn't had much of a commercial pulse: According to Nielsen SoundScan, the new album has barely passed the 400,000 mark since its April release. A previous CD, 2003's overlooked "Try This," was only moderately more successful, with 709,000 copies sold.

Fine numbers for most recording artists, but busts by superstar standards.

A funny thing has happened on the way to Pink's relative fade-out, though. Instead of drowning in self-pity, the singer seems to have shrugged her boxy shoulders at her fate. So she's not playing multiple nights at Madison Square Garden. So what? She never said she wanted to be the new Madonna, anyway.

Sunday, Pink strode proudly onto the 9:30 stage carrying a whip and flashing a devilish grin as she boasted about her independence. "Tonight I'll do what I want 'cuz I can," she sang defiantly to a sold-out crowd that included a handful of women wearing Day-Glo pink wigs. Never mind that Pink's own locks are now platinum blond.

Positioning herself as something of a rebel yeller, she sang of being a troublemaker ("I disturb my town," she observed), a bad team player ("Can't take direction") and a tough broad ("You can run over me with your 18-wheeler truck / And I won't give a" -- well, you know).

Having collaborated with a long list of top songwriters and producers during her six-year career, Pink is no one-trick lyrical pony, and so she also performed plenty of aching confessionals, including "Just Like a Pill," "Lonely Girl" and the troubling "Family Portrait." In fact, she included enough gloomy, bereft songs in the 75-minute set that she was compelled to jokingly tell the audience at one point: "You can put your razors away; no more sad [songs]."

Pink also got topical, first to skewer Paris Hilton and her vapid "porno paparazzi girls" ilk in the uproarious "Stupid Girls," and later to dump on President Bush in "Dear Mr. President." While the latter song was performed with acoustic guitar accompaniment, Pink's raspy vocals were generally braced by arena-ready power chords. The wailing guitar parts might have overwhelmed a lesser artist, but Pink possesses a powerful, distinctive voice (not to mention terrific pitch control), and she easily soared over the instrumentation.

The only time her vocals seemed to get lost, in fact, was on a cover of an early-'90s hit by 4 Non Blondes, "What's Up?" -- a nod to Pink's idol and occasional collaborator, Linda Perry. It wasn't the instrumentation that overpowered, though; it was the singing coming from the crowd, which, oddly, responded more vociferously to that song than any of the 15 Pink originals in the set.

Not even a shimmering, raucous encore version of "Get the Party Started" (which included a short interpolation of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams") got the party going quite like "What's Up?"

Just one more reason to pity Pink.