Number Ones - Pink 'Raise Your Glass'

The seventh installment of a recurring feature where we listen to and analyse the latest number one Australian single so you don’t have to.

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Pink
Raise Your Glass
LaFace/Sony BMG

Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” debuts at number one this week, and is the second debut in a row (after Rihanna's 'Only Girl (In The World' ) to claim #1. This is likely testament to Pink’s local star power: last year, Pink played 58 arena shows in Australia, breaking all manner of local records. Right now, she could probably do a duet with Robert Mugabe and it would still sell records. Produced by long time teen pop Swedish Svengali Max Martin (most famous for Britney’s 'Baby One More Time', but also responsible for Pink’s 'So What' and 'Who Knew'), it is her fifth number one (her first, 'Most Girls', was ten years ago).



Pink - 'Raise Your Glass'

The polite way to describe the song is that it is very carefully sculptured for mass market appeal: it is pure pop in every sense of the word. Max Martin knows his way around a hit songwriting formula, and 'Raise Your Glass' exploits this like Apple and Chinese factory workers. Nothing is left to chance. It probably sounds great for the purpose to which it has been intended: celebrating with your friends. It’s definitely catchy, between the “C’mon and c’mon and raise your glass” hook, the guitar line at the start, and the (predictable) wall of sound explosion that is the chorus.

The other way to describe the song is bland, bland, bland. It both sounds like every previous Pink song and half the current Top 10, at once. In fact, the rhythm and melody of the hook, where Pink sings “raise your glass”, is exactly the same as the one in Katy Perry’s 'Teenage Dream', where Perry sings “Teen-age dream” (which co-incidentally more than echoed the chorus hook in her 'California Gurls', and both of which were also co-produced by Max Martin). The synthy sheen and insistent beat of the song isn’t a million miles away from Taio Cruz’s Dynamite', either, which also happens to be a Max Martin co-production.

Part of Pink's appeal is in the idea that she is a rock star: after all, in case you didn’t notice, the hook of her last #1 single, 'So What' was "So what, I'm still a rock star!". But 'Raise Your Glass' is not rock music. It’s the purest of pure pop - it has the same straightforward disco beat and synthy sheen as every second #1 this year. And even the rock star affectations are still pure pop, considering how common they are in pop music at the moment - Taio Cruz's album is called Rokstarr, and Ke$ha's lyrics have a trashbag quotient lifted straight out of the Motley Crue lyric folder.

So why might Pink want to call herself a rock star? What is the attraction? To my mind, it comes from the conflict between what we instinctually desire and what civilised society wants us to do. This is an old idea. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato talked about this distinction in terms of you being a chariot driver, with one good horse (what society wants) and one unruly horse (our base desires). For the philosopher Nietzsche, the conflict between the Dionysian – the irrational and emotional - and the Apollonian – the sensible and reasoned – was the foundation of all drama. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud thought that the id (the devil on our shoulder telling us what we want to do) and the superego (the good angel telling us what’s right) were real, distinctive parts of the mind. Rock and roll, in popular culture, at least, is a fantasy world where people can live out the short-term pleasures, can indulge the baser instincts of the Dionysian id, of the unruly horse. So if Pink calls herself a rock star, she’s not saying she has a Marshall stack and thunderous drums, she’s saying, “Let’s indulge!”

And people dearly want their rock stars to indulge. Thus all the mythology around bands like Motley Crue and Led Zeppelin - we want our rock stars to star in a nonstop self-absorbed bacchanalian epic! We want them snorting coke with groupies! Throwing televisions out windows! And we even sort of kind of want them succumbing to a tragic fate as a result. We want them to be a little weird, a little uncontrollable. We want them to live in a heightened state, feeling every emotion more intensely than an everyday person. In other words, we want them to live in a fantasy life where they blindly follow our ids. We want them to shun the life of responsibility and hard work (ignoring the inconvenient truth that many rock stars these days work very hard indeed and a responsible for employing a large amount of people) because we would like to. We want them to be the extension of our fantasy.

And with this in mind, it makes sense that rock is all about big dumb riffs played through a stack of Marshall amps and thundering drums; this stuff suggests primal desires. Loud music does seem to have an effect on the very uncomplicated crocodilian core of the brain, the part that makes the heart beat, the part that is concerned about sex and survival. Part of why rock music has largely resisted drum machines and synths is that people want this noise to be made by people, to reflect heartbeats and human rhythms, rather than inhuman machines. Of course, if there is a drummer on 'Raise Your Glass' (however unlikely), he has been quantized in order to sound mechanical, and it is this kind of thing is which might make people resist Pink’s proclamations that she is still a rock star.

Nonetheless, pure pop or not, 'Raise Your Glass' may well have been written by Freud’s id. Note lyrics about “we’re gonna lose our minds tonight”, being a “party crasher”, “don’t be fancy, just get dancey”, “we will never be anything but loud”, “slam, slam, oh hot damn, what part of party don’t you understand”, and “can’t stop, coming in hot”. And note the interjection at the end of the second chorus, “oh shit, my glass is empty, that sucks”. The idea of the song is celebration – presumably Pink means it as a celebration of her career (it’s a new single from a greatest hits collection), or of her connection with fans. Pink leads into the chorus with the line "why so serious?" - and clearly expects the audience to get the reference to The Joker in The Dark Knight. This is the catchphrase of a character who is psychopathic, who murders just because he can. But in context of the song, it instead suggests a certain self-righteous drunkenness: “I am here to party, goddamn it, because I am a rock star! If you are not here to party, you are missing the point.”

At the same time, the use of the catchphrase alludes to the darker side of the id. All this rock star partying is revelry rather than responsibility, and when people aren't being responsible, there's a real possibility of being hurt. And in merely having to raise the question, the line 'why so serious?' in the song reflects this. Batman, after all, had entirely good reasons for being serious - people he loved died, for starters. And in rockstarpartyworld, people also have entirely good reasons for being serious - losing wallets, dignity, the contents of your stomach, discovering you are alone in a room at 3am with several footballers when all you wanted was a milo, etc. But many people seem to need the release, the rush, that partying and drinking entails. And they damn the consequences, at least until the morning. Partying is a short abdication from the responsibilities of everyday life: the partier does not want to know about responsibilities right now, the partier wants to have fun! And so the “why so serious?” line scans as, “I do not care about your problems, leave me alone.”

The other thing about the idea of the rock star, and Pink in general, that I’ve left unsaid til now, is that the role of the rock star is usually played by a male. Amy Klein, the guitar player in the band Titus Andronicus, had a recent much-discussed blog post abut reading a recent issue of that archetypal chronicle of all things rock, Rolling Stone. Of all the pictures in the magazine, there was only one of a woman playing an instrument, and that was of country-pop star Taylor Swift - not what most Rolling Stone readers would consider genuine music.

In this context, Pink might be doing a sort of feminine reclamation of the idea of the rock star. Women are, in general, subject to more pressure from society than men, and thus seem more acutely aware of society's standards and expectations. Their unruly horses, their ids, are often neglected, because society can have some severe penalties for those who indulge them. Pink, perhaps, provides a safe alternative role model, one that pushes against society’s expectations of women – after all, there’s the short sometimes-whackily dyed-hair and the tattoos and piercings. (And she did critique/move to distance herself from vacuous socialite pop stars in 'Stupid Girls'.) Also, she is (sort of) rejecting the mainstream image of women in being this rock star: women are meant to be responsible and passive and elegant, and Pink portrays herself as none of these things.

At the same time, this is probably more girl power than riot grrl; Pink doesn't totally reject the rules that modern society foists on women so much as rest uneasily against them. She may want to hang out with “dirty little freaks”, but she still shares a lot of mainstream values about femininity, she just wants the process of exploitation to be on her own terms. She still puts her body on display, and often presents herself as desiring male attention, in the same way other pop stars do; instead, however, she presents herself as desiring the kind of men who look at Suicide Girls rather than the kind who’d look at a Playboy. Then again, this isn’t entirely different to what a male rock star would do; David Lee Roth certainly put himself on display in order to gain female attention. Hers is not quite the political feminist critique of society and the process by which capitalism exploits women. But then, this is a pop song about partying, and as far as most of the song’s fans are concerned, that stuff probably falls in the category of: “why so serious?”

Tim Byron