Tom: Stop everything. It’s a new Pink single.
Tom: I’ll freely admit to being a Pink fan. I saw her perform live at the Wireless Festival, and it was one of the best shows I’ve seen. She sang, quite clearly live, while spinning on aerial silks without a safety net. In her grand finale, she swooped above the crowd on a custom-designed winched harness. It was brilliant.
This new single? Well, there are many things wrong with this. It starts slowly, and the verses – with sparse kick drum and guitar behind them – feel like they need a lot more. The lyrics irritate me: “what’s the deal-i-o”, “if you’re too school for cool”, and “don’t be fancy / just get dancey” are all dire. And the spoken mock-interjections that she’s prone to will grate more and more every time I hear it, like the horrible ‘check my flow / uh’ that blights the middle of ‘So What’.
Tim: I don’t mind most of those things, although you’re definitely right about fancy/dancey, and the interjections do go on a bit. My main issue, though, is that there’s not enough singing in it – the chorus is okay, but the verses seem to have only a very vague sense of tune, with her voice hardly varying and it just seems like a half-hearted rap that she can’t really be bothered with.
Tom: But the chorus… well, the chorus nearly makes up for it. A stadium crowd chanting ‘Raise your glass’ all at once will make this song worthwhile – but this definitely ain’t another ‘U + Ur Hand’.
Tim: No – although looking at her past efforts she does seem to go for quantity over quality, hoping that some will stick. Of the twenty six songs she’s put out over the past ten years, I think I like about seven, yet I would still say I like her music. She’ll come out with a good one soon enough.
As for that video: I think – I think – she might be trying to tell us something, and that maybe everybody’s different and it’s a good thing. That’s just a guess, though – it might be something else completely. Oh wait, actually, no it isn’t something else. And she’s not telling us, she’s SCREAMING IT AT US UNTIL WE BLOODY WELL LISTEN.
On the other hand, getting annoyed with the whole PSA-ness of it all does make it a little easier to listen to the song.