Give me a country’s music and I’ll show you a glimpse of its soul.
When we tell the story of the mainstream Australian experience through music, the energy is masculine. It’s Cold Chisel and Hunters and Collectors. It’s Midnight Oil and the Angels. There’s love songs, sure, but it’s mostly war and drinking and uranium.
The songs seep into our culture: think of all the tight, drunken circles of mates at the pub, all the screamed verses of Khe Sanh, all over the country, all through the years. Some of that surely becomes part of a country’s DNA, its identity.
But what if the music that really unites our nation – that really speaks to who we are – is actually the country’s most popular female artist: Pink? And what does our Pink obsession say about us?
To answer that question I went to a Pink concert in Melbourne – one of 35 shows, to which more than 500,000 tickets have been sold. She finishes up her months-long stay in Australia in September.
According to her promoter, if you add up all the tickets Pink, who is American, has sold to Australians since her first 2004 tour, it comes to roughly 2m.
Melbourne is Pink’s biggest market per capita in the world. She is the most popular female artist in Australia – and on a recent night at Rod Laver Arena, she shows us why.
A Pink concert is not Coachella or Splendour in the Grass, with Instagrammable midriffs at 50 paces. Her people wear puffer jackets and sensible shoes, Fitbits and stretch pants, woollen scarves and Pink promotional beanies. (In 2009 Pink made $10m in merch sales during her Funhouse tour of Australia, according to Billboard.)
Her arena crowd look largely Anglo but there is a generational collapse. Everyone from the very elderly to the very young are here. Pink’s core supporters seem to be women aged in their 30s and 40s but there are also some men in the crowd; dads with their daughters, husbands with their wives.
I sit next to a man and his teenage daughter from Melbourne’s outer west. He bought her the ticket as an early birthday present. “Also, I had spinal surgery,” she says. It was a toss-up between tickets for Pink or Katy Perry. She chose Pink.
About four songs in, she turns to me and her father and says: “This is the best concert ever.”
She’s dazzled. So am I. Pink is amazing. She sings while on a trapeze. She sings while simulating sex with a dancer while on a trapeze. She pumps out banger after banger, songs like Get the Party Started and Secrets.
These songs have resonated with Australians: more of us have seen Pink live, and own a Pink album, than any other artist. Somehow attending a Pink concert has become the country’s most common communal pop experience.
The founder of Breitbart news, the late Andrew Breitbart, had a theory: politics flows downstream from culture. If you understand the culture, then you understand the politics.
Yet when I put messages out on social media looking for Pink fans, no one will publicly own up to liking her. She is uncool, too basic, and her fans are easy to mock.
It speaks to a deep and gendered cultural snobbery about the tastes of white, middle-aged women in Australia – the cohort who make Pink shows sell out. This crowd don’t make the culture, they consume it – in the form of power bar classes, Mamamia, The Bachelor, holidays in Byron and Michelle Bridges’ 12-week body transformation.
They’re the “minivan majority”, as the influential gossip blogger Lainey Gossip terms them.
Yet this is who we are. The diesel and dust image of Australia is becoming a relic. According to the latest census in 2016, the average Australian is a 38-year-old white, married mother of two – just like Pink.
Australia’s politics may be close to those of Pink’s too: liberal and progressive, but only up to a point. There’s no talk of a more complex and divisive intersectional feminism in Pink’s music – she doesn’t deviate that far from the centre – but she does celebrate individual empowerment and strength in numbers. There’s a moving montage of pussy hats and footage from the #MeToo rallies; her reference to Australia’s marriage equality vote gets the biggest cheer of the night.
Pink’s songs aren’t political paeans but bedroom anthems: the stuff you use to channel your anger over a breakup (“I can’t stay on your life support / you’re making me sick”) or have a few drinks to before you go out (“Let’s get the party started”).
When partway through the Melbourne show she does a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the crowd noticeably cools. The Nirvana song is too knowing, coded and ironic. Surveying the sweep of the audience – historical echoes in its mass, people pressed in and standing in the stalls, small squares of pale skin illuminated by the lights of their phones – there are no fists raised, no mouthed words.
But pull out a Pink standard – a song that speaks plainly of aspects of the human experience, such as breakups, revenge, anger, tenderness – that’s when the real communion happens; that’s when the fists are lifted into the air.
Perhaps our story is more ordinary, suburban and yet somehow more epic than the Barnseys and the Oils. Perhaps it’s less masculine, too. If our most beloved songs – the ones we sing alone in the kitchen and together at parties – are more likely to reflect the experiences of the 38-year-old mum of two, what does that mean? And can we factor it into our conception of ourselves as a nation?
Maybe it’s time to rethink the image of our nation as rural, working class and masculine. Perhaps we’re as suburban, hard-working, fun-loving and – yes – as daggy as Pink. And that’s not a bad thing.
• Pink’s rescheduled Sydney shows will be held on 17, 18 and 19 September at Qudos Bank arena
