If you've caught the video for Pink's "Get the Party Started," you might not immediately intuit that she's turned over a new leaf. There are, however, a few clues. In the right light -- say, the scene where she rips her closet to shreds in search of the right ensemble -- her mix-and-match of punkish attire and clubby abandon might remind you of early Madonna. And speaking only of hair color: our Lady Dye has accessorized her blond ambition with the appropriate new hue. Past that, you'd have to dig into the liner notes, where you come across an unlikely name as the writer and producer of that first single -- former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry, who is also credited as the author, co-author, and/or producer on much of Pink's fabulous new Missundaztood (Arista/LaFace). Perry is a fair candidate for one-hit wonderdom; she's done nothing of note since 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up?" -- you might remember that one better if someone sang the chorus: "I said, `Hey/What's going on?' " -- cracked the mid-'90s alternative charts, and the best one could say for the Blondes' brand of hippy-chick grunge folk is that it set the stage for Alanis Morissette. But Perry is Pink's new secret weapon, and I'm hard-pressed to figure out who has been the more misunderstood -- the soulful Philly white girl raised on hip-hop and R&B but pressed into service by the LaFace marketing team to storm the teen-pop charts, or the earthy singer/songwriter who just wants to dance.

In any case, they bring out the best in each other. And at its best, Pink's Missundaztood owes its intentions less to Perry's "What's going on?" than to Marvin Gaye's. Changing from outfit to outfit may not seem a revolutionary act of salvation, but perhaps because she's been squeezed into teen-pop costumes for the past few years -- and Pink always seemed a particularly uncomfortable fit for the TRL uniform -- it's a relief just to watch her let it all hang out. A couple months back -- I think it was on E! -- Pink was asked whether she finds Britney Spears inspirational. "Does she inspire me?" she spat back. "Yeah, she inspires me to go to the gym." She offers an even better retort on Missundaztood's second song, "Don't Let Me Get Me": "Tired of being compared/to damn Britney Spears/She's so pretty/That just ain't me." With its distorted guitars and '80s synths, this is a song that would seem better suited to the last No Doubt album than to the follow-up of an R&B diva.

And as kiss-offs go, the line that directly precedes the Britney dig is even juicier: "L.A. told me/You'll be a pop star/All you have to change/Is everything you are." That's not the City of Angels she's talking about -- it's L.A. Reid, the architect of her 2000 debut, Can't Take Me Home (LaFace). By Misundaztood's third song, as the guitars bloom again into power-ballad mode and Pink's doleful self-history of low self-esteem finds footing in a drug metaphor, you get the sense we're headed away from LA, and quick. If the music doesn't give you enough of a hint of our destination, check the title: "Just like a Pill." A jagged little one, by the sound of it.

Missundaztood is the kind of tour de force -- soul, gospel (on "Misery," a churchy slow burn, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler shows up to sing harmony), dance pop, rock -- that in theory just isn't possible anymore. Even "Get the Party Started" shouldn't work: its synth-brass punctuation and wah-wah-guitar stammer and Farfisa-organ giggle signify a kind of funk that went out of style in the '80s, '70s, and '60s, respectively. But the beat saves it, and Pink's sassy, playful glide gives you the sense that nothing is out of bounds, that all bets are off. "This is my rap song," she declares at the beginning of "Respect," which builds from a self-possessed old-school swagger reminiscent of Lady B (the Philly hip-hop priestess whose "To the Beat, Y'All" was the first rap record by a woman) to a '60s soul shout indebted to, yes, Aretha Franklin's "Respect." It's what Luscious Jackson were always trying for and never quite pulled off. The language of empowerment has become overused, but if you want to find an instance where it feels justified, try to catch a pop star raging against the machinations of her manufacture. Next to the slyly encoded messages of, say, Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U," Pink's chorus on "18 Wheeler" -- "You can treat me like a slave/I'll go underground" -- sounds like a manifesto for making personal pop music in an age of homogenic fluff.

I like Pink's "Family Portrait" better than Marilyn Manson's or Korn's because hers doesn't presume cataclysmic abuse to be the only precursor for a messed-up childhood. Divorce is plenty, and in the small details of her parents' ugly split, Pink speaks lucidly to unspeakable depths of sorrow, in a song that's true to a time when one is unable to grasp the scope of one's sadness, or powerlessness. "I don't want mama to have to change her last name," she cries, then offers up as much of a solution as she is able: "I'll be so much better . . . I won't spill the milk at dinner." There's a Stefani-esque vibrato waggle at the end of her lines here -- and some of the most tormented and triumphant R&B singing I've heard since Lauryn Hill's Miseducation -- but it comes off less as a signifier of '20s siren chic (that's what I've always imagined Gwen's going for, anyway) than as the uncontrollable quaver of a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"So many playas, you'd think I was a ballgame," she sings on the world-weary "Eventually," as Misundaztood downshifts into clinical depression. You can hear Perry's influence most profoundly on "Dear Diary" and "Lonely Girl" (she co-wrote the former and wrote the latter outright) -- the first a breathy bedroom confession framed by processed acoustic-guitar strumming à la Madonna's "Don't Tell Me," the second a piano-ballad musing on the numbness of stardom. Somewhere in "Lonely Girl" you can hear two voices speaking, the author and the singer: Pink poised at a split in the road with a choice to make, and Perry looking down from a vantage point, wishing for a second chance: "Do you even know who you are/A bottled dream or a superstar?"

On the album's final two songs, Misundaztood becomes something else: neither a musing on stardom nor a refutation of a former self but a vivid evocation of strangled hope caught up in the festering metropolis of her birth. The G-funk-as-blues pedigree of "Gone to California" puts the song in a conceptual ballpark with Zeppelin's "Going to California." "Philadelphia freedom, ohhh, it's not what you have heard," Pink moans over a ghostly Hammond-organ figure. "The city of brotherly love is full of pain and hurt." It's as if she'd stepped back in time, back even before Gamble & Huff, calling up the deep-soul spirits of O.V. Wright and Bobby "Blue" Bland. She sings a love letter to a dying metropolis collapsing on itself, to a city that sends you scampering for your life, "like a rabbit on the run." It's a song of death and corruption, of murder and mourning, of hungry mouths and desperate hustle. And like a Dust Bowl Okie, she has phantom dreams of escape to a place where the streets are paved with silver. Because a new illusion, even of the flimsy variety, is better than a shattered one.

"Gone to California" doesn't offer a lyrically sophisticated vision, though the feeling behind it is brutal -- Philadelphia is a city that defies even its finest chroniclers' best efforts to make sense of it. Listening to this song, I was reminded of Steve Lopez, the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist (now with the LA Times) who was for two decades the voice of the city. He too was haunted by North Philadelphia and the sight of mothers mourning over young bodies. Before he moved to California, he completed a book called Third and Indiana; as a novel it wasn't much, but as a love letter to a dying city it was perhaps his finest moment. The novel's central melodramatic device is a mysterious graffitist who paints a line of chalk-outline bodies along Broad Street, one for every child killed in the city one summer, the bodies in the street advancing slowly on a collision course with grand old City Hall. There's a video in there somewhere.

The final haunting song on Missundaztood, "My Vietnam," opens with the sound of gunfire and helicopters. It could reasonably be interpreted as Pink's song for her father, a Vietnam vet and amateur musician who sang her to sleep with his own folksy ballads about the price of freedom. "This is my Vietnam, I'm at war," she sings, as if to describe her battles in terms her daddy will understand. "Life keeps dropping bombs, and I keep score." Had Pink come from any city other than Philadelphia, maybe this would pass as unduly melodramatic. And she's almost too young to remember the spring day in 1985 when Osage Avenue burned, a day when Philadelphia became, for those of us living there then, our Vietnam -- an afternoon when the elected mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson W. Goode, authorized his police force to bomb his own city. On May 13, 1985, 37 pounds of C-4 were dropped on 6221 Osage Avenue from a helicopter; Goode kept his fire department from putting out the resulting blaze, and 61 houses went up in flames. Among the dead were five children, a couple of whom would be about Pink's age today. From the helicopters of "My Vietnam" comes a beat, and from the air comes a snippet of acoustic guitar, and from the city's streets comes a voice.

THE HYPNOTICALLY SWIVELING hips of Shakira might be the best special effect to make it into a music video this year -- big budgets and big tits be damned. After looking at the video for her breakthrough hit "Wherever, Whenever" -- it has the almost subliminal pixellated glaze one associates with European news feeds -- and listening to the yodeling hook, my first impression was of having accidentally tuned in to a Scandinavian MTV affiliate. Trying to get a handle on just where the hell Shakira is from is hard if your only guide is her music. The panpipes sound less Andean than vegemite-sandwich Australian. There's a sharp, hard sneer to some of her vowels that makes her a dead ringer for the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan. And at other times she blusters her way through the kind of over-emotive light-opera stunts that made Pat Benatar a star.

It turns out she's from way, way down South (Bogotá); with a few albums already to her credit, she's been whipped into shape for North American consumption by Gloria Estefan's husband and producer, Emilio Estefan Jr. Although she's been touted as a Latino Britney, her forebears are, more to the point, Ricky Martin -- those hips! -- and maybe Shania Twain, if only in that Shakira has succeeded (the way Mutt Lange turned Def Leppard hooks into country-pop hits) in turning '80s new wave into new-century pop. There seems to be a consensus among producers south of the border that American pop audiences are suckers for surf-guitar licks. And since the one on "La Vida Loca" worked so well for Ricky, there are a half-dozen here. Outside the single, the templates for Shakira's Laundry Service (Epic) are imported from '80s hard rock -- a little Bangles, a little Go-Go's. Note to Susannah Hoffs: have you thought about taking up belly dancing?

Issue Date: January 18 - 24, 2002