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"I'm so not Bikini Girl."

Tell me what do they see
When they look at me.
Do they see my many personalities, oh no?
— Pink, "Split Personality"

What's not to like about Pink? So audacious, so adorable, so happy to be "your connection to the party line." And while she's plainly got self-confidence to burn, she's still willing to dissect the lunacy known as pop-stardom, to wonder aloud at all the dressing up and happy face-making. For Pink, a pair of army pants and a bare midriff are quite glam enough, thank you. All the rest of it -- the precision choreography, the processed vocals, the glittery minidresses -- is just so much make-believe.

This isn't to say that Pink's frankness regarding such artifice is wholly original or even that insightful. But she brings an unmistakable charm and energy to the whole business, as well as a healthy role model-ish resistance to the usual pop-girl "ideals." Recall her brief stint on MTV's Movie House, where she looked genuinely flustered while interviewing Brad Pitt, but was also perfectly happy to hand out her new cd to every movie star she met on the Ocean's Eleven junket.

Or consider her appearance on MTV Diary (17 November 2001), where she ran through the standard Diary routine (here's me at work, here's me in the car, here's me with my family), and still managed to deliver a little twist at the end, harmonizing with her Vietnam vet dad on a song he wrote about the war, she looks positively cozy and touched. Yet, I think my favorite moment came when, heading off to one of those requisite glam-photo shoots, she announced, with admirable distaste, "I'm so not Bikini Girl."

Indeed, she is not. For all her talent, fame, and good fortune, Pink has a real girl's body and performs a real girl's frustrations and pleasures. Remember the thrill of seeing her in that first video, for "There You Go" -- not only does she send a motorcycle crashing through Bad Boyfriend's apartment window, but better, proceeds to cheer her own ingenuity and daring? "When I say, 'I'm through,' I'm through," she sings. "Basically I'm through with you." Call it the "You go girl" anthem. Other tracks on the double platinum first album, Can't Take Me Home, express a similar, recognizable rage: consider "You Make Me Sick," on which she declares, "Baby was smooth, but I knew it was game / Hell of a cool, but you men are the same"; or "Hell Wit Ya," where she snarls, "So I hear I've met the wench before / Yeah, I remember that time we went to Pizza Hut and you told me she was your cousin / I hear you learned to open doors / So when did you become such a damn gentleman?"

Pink's style is surely her own. But still, she tells MTV's Jennifer Schonborn, she's asked repeatedly to compare herself to Britney, Christina, and Jessica, "just because we're the same age, or girls, young white girls singing pop music or whatever we do." Anyone paying attention would know that this "whatever" is different for all these performers. For one thing, Pink's music tends to be classified as "soul/r&b," that is, she's a "white girl who sings like a black girl." In part, the designation is a function of her being signed to LaFace, who originally signed her as part of a three-girl group called Choice, back when she was a teenager on the Philadelphia club scene. And since that time, she has developed her big-belty voice and independent girl attitude, and even expanded her generic repertoire.

In a perfect world, this designation might mean that years of crossover marketing and politics have come to a logical and progressive end, such that hybrid categories no longer signal race or more precisely, limitations assigned to race, but a variety of musical distinctions and fluidities. To an extent, this is true, but it is also true that Pink, who is decidedly more like Destiny's Child than Mandy Moore, is able to move across industry categories more easily than most minority acts precisely because she is white.

On her new album, Missundaztood, the former Alicia Moore is making the most of this ability. While she's talked a lot about being influenced by rock that her dad used to play for her, the album also reveals her affection for Janis Joplin, Guns N' Roses, Aretha, and Madonna, ranging from funky dance-pop ("Get the Party Started"), to hiphoppy-pop ("Respect"), from rock-girl manifestos ("18 Wheeler," "Numb") and confessional ballads ("Family Portrait," "My Vietnam") to blues ("Misery," with Richie Sambora on guitar and Steven Tyler, of all people, on vocals with her).

The album unquestionably shows off her vocal range. And it's more personal than the first record, because, the story goes, Pink had more "control" of its content and shape (keeping in mind that the same phrase has been applied to Britney). The first single off Missundaztood, in case you've been living under a rock and somehow missed it, is "Get The Party Started." Assured and dynamic, Pink works herself to a fervent festive pitch: "Making my connection as I enter the room / Everybody's chillin' as I set up the groove." And even if it has rather worn out its welcome by now, having been overused to promote both the NBA and Bally's Health Spas, not to mention its relentless rotating on MTV, you can see why it's so popular. Written by former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry (who produced and wrote or cowrote eight tracks on the record), it's damn infectious: "Get this party started on a Saturday night. / Everybody's waiting for me to arrive. / Sending out the message to all of my friends. / We'll be looking flashy in my Mercedes Benz. / I got lots of style check my gold diamond rings. / I can go for miles, if you know what I mean. / I'm coming up, so you better get this party started."

The video for "Party" was also popular, not least because it's full of joyfully aggressive girls' self-love, with a few boys hanging round as supporting characters. Not only does it feature lots of Hype-Williams-inspired wide-angles, but it also focuses on Pink's lively adventures with her girlfriend/party partner, as they find their way from Pink's apartment to the club -- by car, borrowed skateboards, and finally, by a window-washer's hoist (adorned with the obligatory post-9-11 U.S. flag). The two girls make a great couple, fully able to take care of themselves and entertain each other. However straight Pink may be in practice, the video reads all ways, and her fans -- queer and straight -- appreciate her unabashed girl power and enthusiastic genderfuck.

Even before "Party" made Pink ubiquitous, her mainstream popularity was clearly on the rise. She's been invited to appear at the appropriate rock-star get-togethers, from Michael Jackson's post-9-11 jamboree in DC, to Dick Clark's New Year's Eve Party, to Naughty by Nature's due-in-April album, iicons (also featuring guest spots by Carl Thomas, 3LW, Method Man and Redman, Queen Latifah -- yes, most everybody available, including Tupac, Treach's dead "best friend," according to MTV.com). Not to mention her participation in a certain hyper-popular girly-action music video called "Lady Marmalade." Though Pink looked less than comfortable in her drag-queeny lingerie, she belted with gusto and didn't embarrass herself by wearing too much hair. No doubt about it, for what it's worth, Pink has developed considerable industry cred.

In her new single, "Don't Let Me Get Me," Pink and producer/co-writer Dallas Austin have put together an emphatic critique of that industry. Even aside from Pink is clearly self-aware of what it means to have said cred, and moreover, what it means to be a celebrity and ostensible "role model." As she tells Teen magazine, "I don't think girls should beat themselves down.... I think girls are much cooler than they think they are. We're so emotional and we're so open to so many different kinds of ideas and energy." You can see this kind of thinking all over Pink's work, perhaps especially in her increasingly confident live performances and in her videos, where she is by turns saucy and persuasively pissed off.

The video for "Don't Let Me Get Me," partly autobiographical and inventively conceived by director Dave Meyers (with whom she's now worked on five videos), reveals the effects of such thinking. With "Party" giving her some clout, the new video argues clearly against what she calls "teenybopper garbage," and reveals what it costs and what it takes to be a girl in this culture. While some viewers might find it hard to believe that Pink (who is, of course, beautiful) has serious anxieties about being measured against "damn Britney Spears," her declarations here have everything to do with the difficulties of surviving high school.

As if in answer to Britney's very own "Hit Me Baby... One More Time," the video begins with Pink slouched in her high school classroom, restless and bored, though not so "cute" as Spears's jailbait schoolgirl. But, as she tells it, there's not a chance she's going to be dancing in sync with a crew of girls in short skirts out by the lockers: "Never win first place," she sings, "I don't support the team / I can't take direction, and my socks are never clean. / Teachers dated me, my parents hated me, / I was always in a fight, cuz I can't do nothin' right."

Pink's memory of high school (here named Moore High School, after her former self) has little to do with boyfriends, team sports, and slumber parties. Instead, she recalls, "Every day I fight a war against the mirror / I can't take the person starin' back at me / I'm a hazard to myself / Don't let me get me." That she is such a "hazard" becomes clear when the scene cuts to the locker room, where Pink is arguing with that self in the mirror (another version of Pink, taunting her), as her beauty queen classmates in their Victoria's Secret underwear cower away, afraid of her rage and aggression: she punches at the glass (and, as she says in Making the Video, after doing her own "stunt," she only gets a couple of bruises and scratches on her knuckles), before the gym teacher comes to cart her off.

Cut to the next stage, as her career begins. Pink sits in a swank armchair, surrounded by fine office art, flipping through a magazine with her face on it. She sings, "L.A. [as in Reid, of LaFace Records] told me, 'You'll be a pop star, / All you have to change is everything you are.' / Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears / She's so pretty, that just ain't me." In the video, the aspiring star's reeducation includes etiquette lessons, beauty makeovers (the apparent epitome is a stick figure with huge breasts), and a whack video shoot, with male models standing stationary behind some kid of gray scrim, a "ravaged landscape" set, and a big shiny motorcycle as prop. Maybe that first video wasn't such a thrill for her after all.