This Week On Billboard: Pink – Raise Your Glass

This Week On Billboard is where I unabashedly critique the current no. 1 hit on Billboard.com, the major yardstick for what's "hot" in music today. In order to simplify the review for those who don't want to read the whole article, each song is given a "!" rating, in which the finest grabs five of them. It's been gone for a while, now it's back after a 22-month hiatus.

A review of this week's number one single right after Pink wishes you'd just freak out (freak out already)






I hate Pink. There's no top 40 artist of the past decade who I hate more than her. I don’t hate her music per se; I do enjoy some of her singles like “Most Girls” and “Get The Party Started”. I hate Pink as a person, as a character, as a concept. Remember the M!ssundaztood era? Or the whole meaning of “Stupid Girls”? It feels as if she goes out of her way to reveal that she is unfairly lumped with all of the “stupid” princesses of pop. But, her ulterior motive is to appeal to the unpopular kids, the demographic scorned by the shallow, pop listening, beautiful people. As an attempt to distance herself from the talentless pop icons, she consistently proves her authenticity to the world by singing like Pat Benetar, adding stadium-filling rock guitars in her tracks, and advertising that she mightily fought record companies for control of her career.

The fans of Pink are almost as repulsive as her, because they’re completely bought in to the fact that their pop idol is “better” because there’s a difference in packaging. Pink is not a skank like Britney or Christina. Pink has a higher IQ. Pink writes her own songs. Pink is pop rock. Pink is empowering. I’m smarter than you because I like Pink and you like “pop”. Wake up, kids. Pink is just trying to sell records, just like every other musician out there. It’s one of the few universal truths in music.

It looks like she sold a ton of records this week with “Raise Your Glass” finally reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart after its seventh week. The single is straight off the template that she’s been using to corroborate her antipathy to pop: raspy vocals, power chords, “where’s the rock & roll?”, ironic use of hip-hop slang, rebellious profanity, outdated clichés, lame attempts at self-deprecating humor. It’s all there. I do have to give a lot of credit to Pink for routinely coming out with anthemic choruses. The main reason why she’s able to aggregate an immense amount of nitty-gritty minions is because it’s exceptionally fun to sing along to her songs. The one featured here is one of her more enslaving hooks to date—like Pulp’s “Common People” for her dirty little freaks—even if it’s downgraded by its self-righteousness and its dependency on smart-alecky wordplay and overused phrases in the verses.

It’s hard to take her pleas for nonconformity seriously if she's going to present her reasoning in a way that sounds like the musical trend that’s hot at the moment. Naturally, “Raise Your Glass” is written by none other than the evil genius of pop, Max Martin, who has also written for every shallow pop artist in the planet, such as Backstreet Boys, Britney, Westlife, Kelly Clarkson, and Vanessa Hudgens. Remember that this is a list of artists she’s vehemently separating herself from. It’s not like this is Pink and Martin’s first collaboration. “Raise Your Glass” is the tenth song they released together, a discography that contains another Billboard no.1 hit, 2008’s “So What”.

The music itself seems as if Max Martin devised it in a single sitting, and because of that, ”Raise Your Glass” sounds like it could’ve been sung by anyone from Usher to Miranda Cosgrove. It also doesn’t help that it has the 4/4 thump that the world is currently obsessed with, a rhythm that homogenized pop, rock & R&B into one analogous, floor stomping, musical alloy. A standardized sound is not a problem in and of itself, and I don’t blame the two for employing the beat—it’s an easy way to achieve a sense of propulsion—but it all goes back to her persistence to sell herself as an alternative. The recruitment of Max Martin along with their adoption of 2010’s most popular radio production causes her to look like a hypocrite. Not even her efforts to make fun of her own lyrics using a secondary vocal can save how much I hate her.

(t5!) score: !!