For over seventeen years now, Alecia Beth Moore, better known as Pink (or P!nk), has maintained impressive status as one of the most affluent pop artists. A true veteran of her craft, Pink’s album, “Beautiful Trauma,” stands as a testament to her unquestionable ability to continue to produce a well-executed project that will influence other artists for years to come.

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Pop music, as a genre, frequently tackles the widespread and timeless experience of being a person, and “Beautiful Trauma” is no different. On this album Pink approaches the album’s themes with a straightforward grace that can only come from the experience of a long career. From the initial timeless lament of a failed relationship over the title track’s raw kick drums and exalting brass section, to the congregational ballads that conclude the album with “nothing but a victory,” the album expertly communicates an optimistic certainty that can easily fall flat when poorly developed.

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Pink’s use of imagery to build up a larger idea is one of her defining strengths. There’s several moments of religious imagery which highlight the immediacy of her subject matter. “Revenge (feat. Eminem),” for example, plays with the idea of revenge involvement with a new romantic partner after being cheated on. “Like […] Abel in that Bible bit / Revenge is sweet, isn’t it?” Pink rhetorically asks before Eminem later reminds, “Just remember, you cheated on me first – bitch!” Here, the act of cheating is illustrated as comparable to murder, and reinforced by Eminem’s fantasizing “stabbed you in [the back]” (x4) towards the end of his feature. Later, on the song, “Barbies,” Pink confesses that she wishes she could take a break from the daily routine of “another day, another sin” and “go back to playing with Barbies in [her] room.” In tandem with the bridge’s remembrances of “pink canopies […] grass-stained knees [… and] rolling pixie sticks to smoke,” the song’s symphonic rise and fall contextualize a childlike desire to control and imagine by playing with dolls. This action, combined with the eagerness to grow up (like smoking pixie sticks) suggest the dangerous influence on adulthood that childhood can have. An idea that every person can relate to in some way or another.

 

The causality of the album does not stop here however. Perceptively, Pink illustrates causality over the course of the whole album, whose runtime could be paralleled to a lifetime. While seven out of the first nine tracks are underscored by Pink’s recognition of her own regrets as they pertain to relationships, track ten, “Better Life” caps off this recognition by turning to the fear. Specifically, the unshakeable fear that her husband might “picture a better life, a better wife.” A universal fear that whomever we might end up with regrets us like we did everyone else before. As Pink illustrates, the nature of this transference is slick, and abrupt.

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The expanse of her (and to a large extent, our) fears do not stop with personal relationships, but extend rapidly to existential fears, which naturally fits in amongst the LP’s established religious and interpersonal concerns. The festive and questioning “I Am Here” features Pink, among the numerous background voices, exclaiming “I am here!” A statement which, serves as both comfort and explanation for the preceding question, “where does everybody go when they go?” The only consolation being that “the question is clear,” as the album seems to take solace in the succinctness of the inquiry.

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As the album concludes with two hopeful ballads, “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” and “You Get My Love,” it appears as if the existential question has been outright ignored. The former track is empowering, “the stones you throw can make me bleed / but I won’t stop until we’re free,” while the latter is confessional, “while you were sleeping, I decided to lay it out […] I whispered the ways that I’m ashamed of myself.” The form and composition of these final remarks resemble the closing of Sunday service, designed to bring the congregation, the audience, to acknowledge mistakes and walk away feeling empowered. Pink, however, has critically secularized this formula. “It’s no longer a fantasy,” she explains. It is “about us […] about all the broken happy ever afters […] about all the plans that ended in disaster.” It is about the beauty in our immediate lives: our “Beautiful Trauma.”