News feed
Credit: Getty Images
From Raise Your Glass to Give Me A Reason to So What to Get The Party Started, PINK performed them all in a mash-up so good, it made us nostalgic for the teenager in us all; soul-searching, self-discovering and looking up to a rebellious woman who stood up to social injustices in 2008.
Flash-forward to 2017 and PINK, just one month short of releasing her new album, is accepting the MTV VMA Michael Jackson Vanguard Award. It was her acceptance speech though that reminded us the 37-year-old singer still stands for all of those values that made her music so relatable, if not even more relevant today under the rigid viewpoints of the Trump administration.
PINK told the audience her daughter had recently come to her and told her she thought she was the ugliest person she knew. “I look like a boy with long hair,” five-year-old Willow told her mum. The singer responded by making her daughter a PowerPoint presentation of music marvels like Prince, David Bowie, Annie Lennox and Janis Joplin, all “androgynous rock stars” and “artists that live their truth, are probably made fun of every day of their lives, and carry on, and wave their flag, and inspire the rest of us.”
“[People] say that I look like a boy, or I am too masculine, too many opinions, my body is too strong,” she continued, telling the audience that in response to the criticisms, she pushes forward and sells out arenas across the world. “So, baby, girl,” she concluded, “we don’t change. We take the gravel and the shell and we make a pearl.”
Watch her performance here.
Vanguard Award winner @pink gives an incredible career-spanning performance at the #VMAs ? pic.twitter.com/NocVnkotmZ
— MTV (@MTV) August 28, 2017
