The Supreme Court Isn't Exactly Sure How to Break the Internet So They'll Probably Leave It Well Enough Alone For Now
PLUS: A P!nk Retrospective
Pretend the Internet doesn’t exist. Instead, imagine a company called YouBB. The “BB” is short for “bulletin boards.” YouBB administers a number of shopping-mall-sized facilities throughout the country whose interior walls are lined with cork bulletin boards and where, for no cost at all, individuals and organizations can pin their own personal flyers to those walls. (YouBB makes money by giving very prominent placement in their facilities to advertisers, whose flyers are often difficult to avoid.)
People make some pretty fly flyers, so people love visiting YouBB. There’s a lot of dumb, junky flyers, too (so many cat pictures, as well as a lot of crazy talk and some rather unsavory stuff) but that’s what you get when everyone has access to thumbtacks. I like going there because that’s where I see the new Marvel movie posters, view snapshots from the latest Springsteen concert, and read transcripts of the late-night shows I missed because I was too tired to stay up and watch them myself. The kids these days spend hours looking at flyers at YouBB.
Here’s the tricky thing about YouBB, though: It’s not well-organized. People just go in there and slap whatever they want to the next open space on the walls. When I visit to look at flyers with Chicago Cubs highlights on them, I would have no idea where to find them if not for the helpful people at the service desk, who have cataloged all the flyers and tell me what I’m looking for is located on the second floor, panel 316, coordinate M-4. Fantastic. I don’t know what I’d do without the service desk. I suppose the Cubs or Major League Baseball could operate their own bulletin board facility or ask YouBB for their own designated bulletin board at my local YouBB, but I really like the convenience of having it all in one place, especially since my dishwasher is making a funny noise and I want to look for a flyer that might help me fix it.
But an interesting thing happened last week when I was at YouBB. I was looking at a flyer with pictures from Springsteen’s performance of “Backstreets” the other night in Tulsa and when I finished, someone who worked for YouBB immediately came up and told me I might be interested in viewing some pictures of Springsteen’s recent performance of “Badlands” in Kansas City. Of course I was! The worker handed me the location of that flyer (third floor, panel 488, coordinate D-9) and off I went. And when I was done there, another worker recommended more flyers from a Springsteen concert in Houston. Awesome! I spent at least an hour looking at Springsteen flyers based off these YouBB workers’ recommendations. Eventually they suggested I view some Billy Joel and John Mellencamp flyers, which were OK, but I wasn’t interested in the Bon Jovi tip so I finally left.
I appreciated those recommendations, but then I heard from a friend about how YouBB’s service desk wasn’t just helping people find this weird flyer explaining how Liz Cheney is a lizard person but that YouBB employees were then recommending to these people other flyers alleging all sorts of public figures—Tom Hanks, Kyrie Irving, Chief Justice John Roberts—are lizard people too. There are a lot of YouBB patrons who have really bought into this lizard people stuff. Someone who viewed lizard people flyers at my local YouBB was even arrested for stalking my school district’s superintendent and threatening her with harm on the assumption she was secretly a reptilian overlord. And it doesn’t just stop with that. I’ve heard YouBB has been recommending flyers containing messages that are racist, promote violence, or deny the efficacy of vaccines based on their patron’s interests in flyers related to those subjects.
We don’t actually live in YouBB’s world, but I think this hypothetical dilemma concerning YouBB is at the heart of two cases the Supreme Court heard this week concerning the legal responsibilities of Internet companies. Many ears perked up when the Court added those cases to its docket last year, as they have the potential to enable the Court to completely upend the Internet as we know it. However, during oral arguments this week, the Court’s justices did not appear inclined to alter the status quo even as they searched for a standard they could deploy that might target very specific aspects of the law in question without having a chilling effect on the Internet as a whole. It’s a mindboggling issue to reckon with, and while it’s probably best the Supreme Court is leaving it well enough alone, it’s unfortunate they didn’t use the cases to dig deeper into the troubling behavior of Big Tech companies.
The cases in question are Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh. Gonzalez is the more important of the two, as it revolves around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which is often touted as “the 26 words that created the Internet.” Those 26 words are
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
What that means is a website can’t be held liable for what a third party posts on that website. For example, let’s say some idiot takes to Twitter to declare COVID can be cured by ingesting bleach (NOTE: It can’t). Twitter can’t be sued for wrongful death if someone reads that message, drinks bleach, and then dies. (NOTE: Never drink bleach.) The idiot who posted such a message has some legal exposure, but not Twitter, which is just a so-called “dumb pipe” carrying content between creator and consumer.
You can see why such a law would be critical to the development of the Internet: If Internet services with millions of content creators could be sued for what those content creators post online, those Internet services may choose instead not to provide online forums to others or severely limit the number of people/entities allowed to post online. In other words, no social media, no YouTube, no Substack, not even most general .com websites, as most (I presume) are hosted by third party servers somewhere. To shield themselves from lawsuits, Internet services would want to vet everything before it went online, a gargantuan task when you consider YouTube users alone today upload 500 hours of content per minute. Without Section 230, we’d probably still have an Internet, but there would be far fewer websites and likely no private individual content creators beyond those under the watchful editorial eye of the few websites that did exist. (That might not necessarily be a bad thing, but it would definitely be a different Internet than the one we’ve grown accustomed to.)
But the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an exchange student killed in the 2015 Paris ISIS attack, has challenged the idea that an Internet service provider like YouTube is nothing more than a dumb pipe. The lawyers representing the Gonzalez family have sued Google, the owner of YouTube, for using algorithms that personalize recommendations and promote content that individual YouTube content consumers would presumably be interested in viewing. In this case, the Gonzalez family lawyers argued YouTube’s algorithms recommended videos that radicalized the beliefs of those who killed their daughter and encouraged her killers to act violently in Paris in 2015.
Twitter v. Taamneh is a similar case but doesn’t revolve around Section 230. Taamneh instead centers on the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows Americans injured by acts of international terrorism to sue anyone who “aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to terrorists. In Taamneh, the family of a man killed during a 2017 terrorist act carried out by ISIS in Istanbul want to sue Twitter because ISIS used the social media site to spread its message and recruit followers. Twitter has argued it isn’t liable because, in legal terms, it didn’t actually “aid and abet” the terrorists.
During oral arguments for these cases, the Supreme Court indicated it was reluctant to issue a ruling that would hold Google and Twitter responsible for allowing members of ISIS to post content to their sites. I think this is wise for a number of reasons. First of all, in Gonzalez, the lawyers representing the Gonzalez family can’t prove those who carried out the terrorist attack actually did so upon watching a YouTube video promoting ISIS. YouTube videos may have played a role in radicalizing the terrorists and even encouraged violent behavior, but anyone associated with that speech—whether that be the ISIS members who made the video or video host YouTube—should only be liable if that speech led to an immediate follow-on action. Let’s face it: If we probably can’t prosecute Donald Trump for encouraging a mob to raid the Capitol because the members of that mob had time during their walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to realize that would be wrong, then it would seem hard to prosecute the makers of a YouTube video, let alone YouTube itself, for a video one of those terrorists may have watched months prior to their attack.
Secondly, in Taamneh, the Court would really have to stretch the legal meaning of the phrase “aid and abet” if it wanted to find Twitter liable for assisting terrorist attacks. Twitter employees were not in contact with the terrorists nor actively assisting them in their illegal activities. Implying Twitter as a means of communication can be held legally responsible for the attack would suggest cell phone companies, landlords, grocery stores, shoe makers, and automobile dealers could also be legally responsible for supplying terrorists with phones, shelter, food, clothing, and means of transport even if those enterprises unwittingly sold their goods and services to them. I doubt many businesses would be able to function if they first had to conduct a background check of every customer to make sure they weren’t selling their products to potential criminals.
Finally, these specific cases don’t suggest a clear-cut remedy to a very real public problem, and a panel of nine judges is not well-situated to work through all the various scenarios it would need to consider before it began punching holes in Section 230. I’m aware Congress is far from its functional best at the moment, but overhauling Section 230 is a task legislative policymakers should take the lead on. It may very well be wise to strip away some of the protections afforded to Internet companies through Section 230—for example, there is a 2018 law that removes legal protections for websites that assist, support, or facilitate activity violating federal sex trafficking laws—but it’s probably better for Congress, which can work with greater legal precision, to formulate such carve outs than the courts, which deal in broader legal principles.
Gonzalez and Taamneh are part of an ongoing public debate in the United States about free speech and, more specifically, free speech on the Internet. No one is really pleased with the current state of affairs. As misinformation about COVID vaccines and the validity of the 2020 election spread across Twitter and Facebook, liberals demanded those companies do more to stop the spread of falsehoods that jeopardized public health and undermined democracy. But as those social media companies stepped up efforts to regulate such speech on their platforms, conservatives argued those companies discriminated against conservative viewpoints in a space that should have allowed for the widest possible range of speech.
Furthermore, the sheer size of these platforms, which makes it difficult for their administrators to effectively police them and enforce company-authored community standards, as well as a growing awareness of the negative effects social media has had on society (for example, some have suggested the recent rise in depression among teenage girls can be attributed to social media) have also drawn calls for increased regulation of these companies. It doesn’t seem right to allow such socially disruptive companies to just throw their hands helplessly in the air as citizens express concerns about the negative social effects of their products. If the algorithms that run their websites are generating bad outcomes, it seems fair for the public to demand those companies fix their algorithms. Yet Internet regulation is a delicate undertaking, and many worry even the slightest tweak to Section 230 could stifle speech on the Internet, turning it from a wild west of free expression into a heavily-moderated space effectively off-limits to billions of speakers. The Supreme Court doesn’t seem interested in doing anything along those lines at all.
That’s unfortunate because it does seem there is an opening to make at least a small but potentially significant adjustment to Section 230. The court’s newest member, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, seemed most interested in zeroing-in on this issue. Questioning Google’s lawyers during arguments over Gonzalez, Jackson asked
Isn't it true that [Section 230] had a more narrow scope of immunity than…what YouTube is arguing here today, and that it really was just about making sure that your platform and other platforms weren’t disincentivized to block and screen and remove offensive content? And so to the extent the question today is, well, can we be sued for making recommendations, that’s just not something the statute was directed to.
Brown is arguing here that there may be a meaningful difference between the search feature and the recommendation feature of social media, and that Section 230 protects the former but not the latter. Internet companies have to be able to present users with search results based on user queries. Without it, the Internet would be unnavigable and useless. If Internet companies could be sued for directing a user to a site based on the user’s query, companies might drop searches all together. For that reason, Section 230 protects the search function.
But recommendations are somewhat different. Recommendations are based on users’ browsing histories. The subsequent suggestions not only direct users to sites similar to the one they are currently viewing, but to sites someone with their personal profile might enjoy or find interesting or sites that are popular with others who match their profile and browsing interests. Recommendations are like searches, but more personalized. They also aren’t essential to the functioning of the Internet, as recommendations follow-on from a search. In fact, their purpose is to keep you browsing (and viewing their advertisers’ ads) by providing you with more and more content you would presumably want to consume. With a recommendation, the Internet company isn’t merely facilitating a search; it’s letting you know they’ve got more where that came from and presenting it to you personally.
You can see the difference in the YouBB hypothetical. It’s one thing to walk up to YouBB’s service desk and ask someone there where you might find a flyer like the one you’re looking for in this huge expanse of a property. It’s another thing for a YouBB employee to come up to you after you found what you were looking for and recommend another flyer they believe would interest you. That’s a much more direct intervention by YouBB than a search.
Now extend that to the Internet. It’s one thing to type “ISIS video” into the search box on YouTube or Twitter or Google and sift through all the results that pop up, and a whole other thing after someone searches for “ISIS video” and watches an ISIS recruitment video for YouTube or Twitter to recommend similar videos. It’s almost an endorsement: Rather than saying, “Here are all the things that fit your search criteria” and letting the user choose, the companies are saying, “We at BigTechGiant think you would be interested in this particular offering.” Those companies could recommend something else or nothing at all. Therefore, a recommendation coming from a tech company could very well fall beyond the umbrella of Section 230 and increase those companies’ legal exposure.
As mentioned earlier, there would still be the problem of proving the content a tech company recommended was responsible for triggering an action. Before fully endorsing this approach, I need to think more deeply about the implications of cracking down on recommendations and if that would have a profoundly chilling effect on the Internet. It may also be that this issue of recommendations goes beyond Section 230 to the First Amendment itself, which may in the vast majority of cases protect the content recommendations a tech company makes to its users. But it does seem Justice Jackson is onto something when she distinguishes between searches and recommendations. Even if these cases don’t lend themselves well to a ruling on that issue, Jackson does suggest a potential way forward for policymakers.
Signals and Noise
Last Monday, in Kyiv.
Some House Republicans ANGRY Biden go to Kyiv on President’s Day!! (More seriously, from Emily Brooks of The Hill: “Biden’s Ukraine Visit Exposes GOP Fault Lines”. And on the politics of it, see Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein: “Republicans Are Painting Themselves Into a Corner Over Ukraine”.)
Kim Hjelmgaard of USA Today visited the frontlines of the war in Ukraine to provide readers with an engaging first hand account of how that war is being waged.
Robyn Dixon and Catherine Melton of the Washington Post take a peak inside Russia, where growing unease with the war in Ukraine among Russian elites and ordinary citizens is effectively silenced by Putin’s authoritarian grip on the country. Yet as the war is prolonged and looks increasingly unwinnable, Putin’s position as a twenty-first century czar may prove precarious.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary Wagner group, has accused Russian military leaders of “treason” for depriving his forces of supplies and ammunition. Prigozhin has become a major face of the war in Russia, with his Wagner group the most effective Russian fighting force. For years, he has maintained close ties to Putin. But there are some indications the Russian high command wants to reign him in, and some wonder if Putin is growing uneasy with his political ambition.
Meanwhile, Steve Hendrix and Serhii Korolchuk of the Washington Post interview two Wagner group POWs about their experiences as convicts deployed to fight (and be slaughtered) in Ukraine.
The UK, France, and Germany are floating the idea of granting Ukraine NATO security guarantees as a way to prod Ukraine to seek peace.
Josh Rogin of the Washington Post writes it would be better for NATO to dramatically increase military aid to Ukraine now so Ukraine can defeat Russia this year rather than allow the war to settle into a stalemate that would advantage Russia in the long term and prolong suffering in Ukraine.
The age of arms control agreements between the United States and Russia may be ending.
China may be preparing to provide Russia with some amount of lethal military aid, which Putin would gladly accept, but some things to consider: 1.) China and Russia have not historically been the best of buddies; and 2.) China’s interest here is probably less in helping Russia win a war than in keeping NATO preoccupied in Ukraine for as long as possible, which means China is probably using Russia and the bodies of Russian soldiers to achieve its ends.
A leaked Russian document revealed Russia’s plan to take over Belarus by the end of the decade.
“I thought I settled this.”—The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln
We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are… https://t.co/Azn8YF1UUyBy the way, is Marge aware she lives in a blue state?
Oh shit, she doubled down!
🧵Thread: Why the left and right should consider a national divorce, not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. Definition of irreconcilable differences: inability to agree on most… https://t.co/6hko0vnHbdMake sure you click on that full thread. Her definition of “irreconcilable differences” (“inability to agree on most things or on important things”) wouldn’t pass muster in a high school English class. (The difference between “most” and “important” things is the difference between getting into an argument over whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time and whether we should go to war with a country or not.) But that’s not even the craziest part. The crazier thing is her idea that we need to split up so that liberals quit cramming their way of life down conservatives’ throats because conservatives want to cram their own way of life down peoples’ throats. Her political theory is people should get to live in their preferred dictatorship. If you don’t see that implied in the above message, see below, from a day later.
Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests that if Democrats move to a red state, they shouldn't be allowed to vote for five years: "You can live there and you can work there, but you don't get to bring your values."So, in other words, partition. I’m sure that would get managed well and Marge would ensure it was handled with care and compassion. But Lord, where do Republicans come up with these people, how do they keep getting crazier, and how do they get elected to public office? (Also, are we sure MTG is well? She seems to be on a real bender. We don’t have another Madison Cawthorn on our hands, do we?)
For more on Marjorie Taylor Greene and why she shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere kook, see “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Civil War” by Peter Wehner for The Atlantic.
Here’s one of the presumably saner Republicans—former South Carolina Governor and current presidential candidate Nikki Haley—saying in 2010 that secession is constitutional (it’s not.) Just curious, but if I suggested South Carolina schools should do a better job teaching their students about the history of the Civil War (secession/slavery/Confederacy = bad, union/civil rights/Lincoln = good), would Haley tell me to shut my woke ass up?
Dan Balz of the Washington Post notes how former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has used the argument that the United States is a racist nation as a foil on the campaign trail while going out of her way to avoid mentioning she removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state flag during her tenure in office. (“She inveighs against suggestions that the United States is a racist nation, using that characterization as a foil to say that she instead sees an America that is ‘strong and proud, not weak and woke.’…When she highlights the tragic shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in her opening video, she speaks of her state’s turning to its basic values and religious faith for healing. Absent is any reference to what was one of the most courageous decisions she made as governor.”)
The Montana Republican Party has told former Montana Governor, RNC chair, and George W. Bush re-election campaign chair Marc Racicot he is no longer a Republican.
Kristina Karamo says she lost the 2022 Michigan gubernatorial election because of “fraud” (read: bad Democrats outvoted Republicans.) She thinks Jay-Z, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, and yoga are satanic. She also just got elected chair of the Michigan GOP. (More like “QOP.”)
Headline of the Week, from Vice News: “The QAnon ‘Meme Queen’ Wants Trump To Help Her Convicted Pedophile Son”
Again, where do these people come from? “It can be argued, periodically, that [fatal child abuse] is actually a cost savings because that child is not going to need any of those government services that they might otherwise be entitled to receive and need based on growing up in this type of environment.”—Alaska State Representative David Eastman (R-Wasilla of all places) (The Alaska House voted 35-1 to censure Eastman for his comments; the lone no-vote came from Eastman.)
But do I really believe him?
"I've been a terrible liar..." Piers Morgan grills republican George Santos, the man who's been branded the biggest fibber in politics. Watch it on TalkTV at 8pm. @piersmorgan | @Santos4Congress | @TalkTV | #PMU“This wasn’t about tricking people.” Yeah, don’t believe a word this guy says.
The office of former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) compiled a report following the 2020 election debunking the election fraud claims that have roiled the state ever since. Brnovich, however, concealed that report from the public and continued to press false claims about voter fraud.
Yeah, I’m sure this is all on the up-and-up: From Axios, “House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot.”
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post comments on how Tucker Carlson is using the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment to claim the Biden administration doesn’t care about white people.
One person who probably can get rail company Norfolk Southern on the phone to clean up East Palestine is Republican Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who’s received $29,000 in political contributions from the company. In fact, the company has spent almost $100,000 on lobbying over the past six years and has pushed back against tighter state rail regulations.
Don Trump parachuted into East Palestine this past week, which only drew attention to the fact his administration chose to roll back rules proposed by the Obama administration to place stricter regulations on the rail industry. Trump did not tell the citizens of the town during his visit that he concluded as president that their eventual suffering was worth less than the cost of requiring rail companies to improve their braking systems.
Be careful, Pete, the next thing he might say is he has bigger hands than you.
Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine is “get people in a room, knock heads and get it done.” Man, why didn’t I think of that?
When Don Trump says he wants to “take back our streets from the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the mentally ill,” something tells me his plans won’t actually involve helping those people.
The Anti-Defamation League found the number of mass shootings motivated by extremism in the United States over the past ten years is three times higher than any other ten-year period on record since the 1970s. All extremist shootings in 2022 were linked to right-wing extremism.
There is growing unease among conservatives over the way Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wields state power.
Abortion activists are bracing for a ruling that could end access to abortion pills nationwide.
David Lynch of the Washington Post writes about a problem with Biden’s “Buy America” initiative attached to his infrastructure plan: Many of the materials needed to update the United States’ infrastructure aren’t manufactured in America. Of course, the infrastructure bill could spur the development of American-based industries to make products like dock cranes, drywall, and fiber optic cables, but that would delay the completion of those projects as well.
The Biden administration’s new border control rule, which would prohibit those who cross the border illegally from requesting asylum, has drawn criticism from migrant advocates and likely won’t satisfy right-wing critics.
The New York state Democratic Party, which employs only four full-time staff members, is a shambles.
The key inflation gauge the Federal Reserve uses is rising at its fastest rate since June.
David Frum writes for The Atlantic about Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s autocratic turn.
Dan Perry writes for CNN about Israel’s authoritarian turn, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slim majority is pushing a law opposed by a majority of Israelis that would gut the nation’s court system. Some major political figures fear the political crisis could lead to civil unrest and bloodshed.
The Atlantic’s Emma Marris looks at a new concern with animal conservation efforts: That we’re trying to save species by setting aside habitats for them where they don’t belong. (“Calling a cougar a ‘mountain lion’ suggests that it prefers the mountains, but Silliman says they used to prowl the lowlands, too, where there were more prey. ‘There’s no such thing as a mountain lion,’ he said. ‘We just made that up. That’s the last place that it lived.’ When conservationists worked to reintroduce sea otters to the Pacific Coast, they assumed they would live … in the sea. But reintroduced otter populations are flourishing in salt marshes and seagrass beds, where they are protected from orcas and sharks.”)
Top 5 Records Music Review: A P!nk Retrospective
Alecia Moore Hart, known professionally as P!nk, released a new album, Trustfall, last weekend. It’s the sort of record you might expect a pop star who’s been working in the recording industry for twenty-three years to release, only better. Like P!nk herself, it has my respect. When she speaks, I listen.
Pop music is a fleeting proposition. What sounds cool today will be out-of-fashion a few years from now, meaning artists who identified with a particular pop moment can see their careers (or at least their moments of peak influence and fame) wither within a decade or less. When they realize their time is up—when the concert venues aren’t full anymore, when a new album lands with a thud, when radio won’t play their new single—they’ve got to make a choice: Make a play for continued pop relevancy at the risk of appearing to sell-out and potentially embarrassing one’s self, or stay true to their sound and style at the risk of fading away. Some artists find ways to prolong their time at the top—Beyoncé and Taylor Swift still command the world’s attention when they release new music—but this dilemma seems to come for everyone.
It’s come for P!nk, too, early in her career in fact. She released her first album, the pop/R&B influenced Can’t Take Me Home, in 2000 before getting roped into the “Lady Marmalade” cover with Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, and Mya for the film Moulin Rouge! in 2001. Later that year, she overhauled her style for the smash album Missundaztood, ditching the nods to Destiny’s Child for a rawer rock sound that still played around with new wave, disco, and rap. P!nk also traded in the upbeat pop themes of Can’t Take Me Home for songs that addressed thornier issues. P!nk now cast herself as a damaged social outcast trying to come to terms with her sense of self, family issues, and psychological demons, all while letting those demons run wild in public.
Missundaztood, which led with the single “Get the Party Started”, set P!nk apart from the polished pop of Aguilera and (as she sings on “Don’t Let Me Get Me”) “damn Britney Spears.” She was more Eminem than N*Sync, a hazard to herself and the public at-large. P!nk seemed to be addressing the same marginalized white kids the mopey turn-of-the-millennium drag rock bands (think Nickelback and Staind) connected with, but her music was way more fun and empowering. You were supposed to move to her music rather than wallow in self-pity, shout the lyrics out your window rather than scream them into your pillow.
There was also a sense of authenticity to her work. If she hadn’t lived what she’s singing about, she certainly understood it, which you can feel even when it comes packaged as a pop song. (Beyond addressing tough topics and being able to actually scream-sing at the whiskey-ravaged end of her voice, one way she pulls this off is in the way she vocalizes obscenities and off-color phrases. She doesn’t use those words for effect or shock value but just lets them roll off her tongue as if that’s the way she regularly converses with [or tells off] others.) In her songs and videos, she often comes across as exposed and vulnerable yet full of bravado and resilience. Female pop stars in the early 00s were almost always objectified on camera, but P!nk would find ways to either defy the camera’s gaze or flip it back on the viewer. If we’re not listening to her music to better understand her, P!nk accuses us of expecting her to live up to our standards and expectations.
P!nk’s follow-up album, the punk influenced Try This (2003), failed to replicate its predecessor’s success. Perhaps it was an early sign of the early 00s pop wave running its course or Avril Lavigne stealing a bit of her thunder or a sense that a bratty pop star with pink hair was destined to be a one-album wonder, but by the time P!nk got around to releasing her fourth album in 2006, she had become enough of a musical afterthought that she titled it I’m Not Dead. The record’s first single, “Stupid Girl”, did moderately well thanks to a memorable video. Yet like Try This, I’m Not Dead did not set the charts on fire. P!nk’s pop moment seemed to have passed.
But then P!nk released a third single from I’m Not Dead, the delightfully scathing and borderline vulgar “U + Ur Hand”, in late August 2006 and soon found herself atop the US Mainstream Top 40 Billboard chart. “U + Ur Hand” represented a slight but critical shift in P!nk’s approach to music making, as she recruited Max Martin and Dr. Luke to help write and produce the song. Martin was the Swedish pop impresario responsible for hits by the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears; he would go on to produce songs for the likes of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and is currently tied for the most #1 hits all-time by a producer with George Martin, who produced the Beatles. Max Martin had worked with Dr. Luke on American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson’s explosive “Since U Been Gone”, a landmark recording that set the standard for 00s pop by fusing indie rock and power pop. Ironically, Martin and Dr. Luke had written “Since U Been Gone” for P!nk, but she passed on it. Martin and Dr. Luke had clearly apprehended P!nk’s talents: A big, abrasive, yet clear voice, one that could tear through a rock song but that shouldn’t be buried in a mix or constrained by the trashy aesthetics of punk. Power pop, that blend of Who-esque hard rock and Beatlesque melodies (think Cheap Trick) would prove to be P!nk’s sweet spot.
Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” may have been the template for this new iteration of pop music, but P!nk was its true avatar, the artist whose persona best matched its style. The sound dominated pop music going forward; think Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”, many of Katy Perry’s major hits (i.e., “I Kissed a Girl”, “Teenage Dream”, “Roar”), Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You”, and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, “Shake It Off”, and “Bad Blood” by Taylor Swift. Even songs like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” by Beyoncé and “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga are indebted to this style. But it’s P!nk who rings the most drama out of it, who pushes it beyond the visceral pleasures of pop and stomp.
Consider what is arguably P!nk’s best song, “So What”, from the 2008 album Funhouse. P!nk wrote the song during a brief separation from her husband, motocross racer Corey Hart. (They reunited without divorcing a year later and remain married with kids to this day.) On its surface, it’s a bitter, immature song about her split from her absentee spouse and her subsequent self-destructive behavior. The song’s instrumentation, which simply follows the sneering melody during the verses, comes across as an amateurish taunt. The chorus, however, is a massive, fist-pumping pick-me-up asserting she doesn’t need her ex because she’s “still a rock star [with] rock moves” and that she’s having more fun without him. But with each passing chorus—and especially by the end of the song—whenever she sings “I’m alright, I’m just fine” and “I don’t want you tonight,” we don’t believe her. She’s on the verge of breaking down, and she knows it. It’s not just that we know she’s not OK or that she’s heartbroken but that she actually still longs for the guy. It takes three earsplitting minutes (an eternity? a moment?) for this rock star to strip away all her spite and resilience and finally land on that honest, aching realization that seems to steady the song in its final seconds. I can think of few artists who can summon the power P!nk does here to blast through an emotion in order to arrive at a deeper emotional truth. Some people have said rock and roll is therapy. If so, “So What” is Exhibit A.
P!nk has been a steady presence in pop music ever since, someone who knows her way around brash rock songs and wounded power ballads alike. Many of the artists I’ve mentioned before—Spears, Aguilera, Lavigne, Perry, Lady Gaga—have since been preserved in amber, forever associated with their moment in time. P!nk crashed and burned early in her career but made it out alive. She’s been following her own musical star for the past two decades. P!nk may not be at the vanguard of pop music anymore, but with all her self-assuredness in tow, she isn’t desperate to be there either.
What P!nk has instead is the admiration of an audience that appreciates her craftsmanship, integrity, and guts. Watch a live performance and you’ll quickly see why she’s earned the respect of so many: She’s a rebel who is a consummate pro; reckless but in command of the stage; barely holding it together but still doing her thing and doing it damn well; trashy but stylish as hell; young and impish but wise; down-to-earth but with no time for middle-of-the-road losers and idiots; independent but defensive of others; feisty, someone who will stand up for herself but compassionate, someone who puts her faith in love; an underdog but a champ; hurt but a survivor; a feminist icon, full stop. In other words, something like a modern-day pop-music equivalent of Dolly Parton.
P!nk also has Parton’s cross-cultural appeal. She’s been a long-time supporter of LGBTQ rights and has made her disdain for Donald Trump clear. But her latest album, which is bathed in synths, ends with a duet with Chris Stapleton, the country musician who just performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl and is often credited with steering Nashville back to its roots on his 2015 album Traveller (see Exit Music). That’s not a play for a new audience but an acknowledgment of how broad-based her popularity is. She can connect with the common person.
Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters is often regarded as the elder statesman keeping the spirit of rock and roll alive in our day and age. A lot of people regard P!nk the same way, but the cultural powers-that-be have yet to acknowledge that sentiment. She probably isn’t looking for any formal recognition, but sometimes you can’t fully appreciate someone until you state the obvious. P!nk is a national treasure.