SECOND round
(5) Shakira, “Hips Don't Lie”
CLOSED DOWN
(4) p!nk, “get the party started”
169-99
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
Authenticity and Shame in the Time of Shakira: sara sams on “hips don’t lie”
lleva, llévame en tu bicicleta
Like any good obsessive pop star fan, I can easily connect almost all of my important life stages to whatever Shakira song was most popular on the radio at the time. In 2017, I was preparing for a move from Spain back to the US following the death of my father, and “Bicicleta” was everywhere. It’s a cutesy, infectious song with a good-humored back-and-forth between Carlos Vives, a Colombian singer songwriter, and Shakira, who he hails as the “girl of the zone” in the song. Take me, take me on your bicycle. I think it’s a cousin to the Queen song in that the music somehow mimics the feeling of wind in your hair, and I didn’t mind that it was following me everywhere, reminding me that joy was still possible.
When I play the song today, I can remember sitting near the beach in Barcelona, watching two friends ride rented city bikes. When I gushed to them about how they appeared to be living the “Bicicleta” dream, one of them reminded me, sweetly, that the song is really a love song for Colombia. When you show Piqué [1] Tayrona [National Park in Columbia], he won’t want to go back to Barcelona. Later that night, we talked about the plagiarism allegations against Shakira, and my soul spasmed. I wanted to unsee some of the YouTube proof they showed me. Ok, sure, “Waka Waka” seemed an obvious steal, but “Hips Don’t Lie”? My subconscious began spinning with a defense of the songwriter.
Seven years later, I’m still trying to figure out why I care so much about Shakira’s artistic integrity.
viajé de Barein hasta Beirut/ fui desde el norte hasta el Polo Sur
In 2005, Philadelphia Inquirer’s Dan DeLuca described Shakira’s music as a “mongrel mix,” praising her ability to incorporate influences from her parents’ different cultural backgrounds— let’s pause to draw one line from Colombia to New York to Lebanon, and then another from Colombia to Cataluña. He also credits her mix for blending qualities from distinct popular genres; he mentions, among others, Metallica and Alanis Morisette. (No wonder I fell for her.) While “mongrel” leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I do like DeLuca’s honest review of Oral Fixation, Vol. 2: “But Shakira’s fervid persona and anything-goes aesthetic— mariachi horns here, a children’s chorus there— makes everything her own. And she’s always nervy, to say the least….”
Shakira’s combined “anything-goes aesthetic” and nerve has raised a lot of eyebrows since then. People lost their shit when she died her hair blond, and while I find it annoying that every female artist gets so closely scrutinized for her hair color, I also understand how easy it must have been to read “blond” as metonymy, a stand-in for Shakira’s “increasingly commercialized (read: anglicized) image” (Oxford Reference). [2] Of course, that’s an image we’re all familiar with by now; we’re savvy to Shakira’s savviness, her ability not only as a singer-songwriter but also as a marketer of global music. I have no grounds from which to make the following claim, but I can imagine her and Piqué conspiring behind the scenes about how much money a good breakup song would make, about how best to play up the sour mood for the press. [3] Her “I” is always a supposed “I,” after all—and DeLuca had it right when he spoke about her lyrical persona using the poet’s terminology.
It’s fairly easy to investigate the succession of artistic inspiration these days. Shakira co-wrote “Hips Don’t Lie” with Wyclef Jean, a song that is overtly in conversation with Jean’s own “Dance Like This,” a song which (again, rather overtly) sampled the salsero Jerry Rivera’s trumpet trill. So should Shakira have also credited Rivera? Or is there some transitive-property kind of understanding, a breadcrumb trail that’s so clear that outright crediting Rivera becomes unnecessary? I’m not asking about what Shakira should or shouldn’t have done legally—the lawyers determine right or wrong when it comes down to money, and it always comes down to money with Shakira, because she’s a woman who makes a lot of it.
Morally speaking: It must have been like an open secret, right? I mean, was there any way that no one would ever trace that musical phrase to its earlier appearances? The way the brass announced itself so unabashedly, with leaping notes of prowess, in so many rooms, in so many cities, in so many countries, for months on end? Maybe in a 2005 world, when YouTube was a rabbit hole you had to go down on purpose? I’m not asking you, not really. I am asking myself: Does she need forgiveness? Why do I need to forgive her, for me? Is it because I’ve romanticized what music critic Lopez refers to as her transnational identity (in “Ojos Así,” she brags, I’ve traveled from Bahrain to Beirut), and that romanticization is key to my own self-conceptualization? Or is it because the attacks on Shakira so often feel like they’re part of a larger problem?
Accusing Shakira of plagiarizing his trumpet arrangement, Rivera called Shakira “indecent.”
Her hair might lie, says another news anchor, after watching a video of the brunette Shakira at age 13, but her dance moves sure don’t.
From Shakira’s Magia, 1991
cada vez que se aparece frente/ a mí tu anatomía
When I was thirteen, Shakira released Donde Estan Los Ladrones (1998). I was wearing too-tight t-shirts my mother shouldn’t have bought me from a store ridiculously called Bebe, and I discovered Shakira on my Discman on a bus ride home from a Spanish field trip. To this day, I thank you, Jasmine, for letting me listen. Jasmine and I were both white girls who excelled in Spanish class, although I think she had tenable experience with a Spanish-speaking culture, whereas I just had what felt like a “really special relationship” with the language. I’d been educated in a bilingual elementary program, so I spoke Spanish somewhat fluently, and it was a language that, at home, felt like something I could keep all to myself. Linguistic doors opened up to universes I could enter, places I could go where most of the people in my life couldn’t follow me.
In those teenage bedrooms parallel to the real one I inhabited in suburban east Tennessee, I heard Shakira express what a local preacher might call “my innermost thoughts and desires.” And she was doing it in a way that somehow didn’t feel at odds with the evangelical cultural soup I was swimming in. Part of this magic likely had to do with my doubtful translations. What does it mean to say sin ti el mundo ya me da igual—“I could give a damn if you leave me,” or “I could give or take the world without you?” I chose the latter but I also heard hints of the former in her voice, and the cognitive dissonance was thrilling.
But another part of the reason why Shakira has—and has always—had this special way of speaking to me through her music is that her personas always seem to know how to toe the line between “sexualized” and “sexual,” between desirable and free to desire: I run out of arguments every time I see your anatomy, she sings, in “Ciega, Sordomuda.” As if she had a good-girl list of reasons not to act on her desires, which she could finally discard. Finally outside of the realm of reason, she didn’t need to worry about, well, giving herself consent.
Of course I don’t know what Shakira’s life has really been like, and I can’t speak to Colombian culture even a little. I knew far less in high school. But as a young girl going through puberty, I could tell that Shakira’s personas lived in a world where to be a loveable woman meant to try and bank on your sex appeal, all while being coy enough to pretend you had none. One needed to be both sexy and pure, somehow, and this required logical acrobatics—and quite a bit of self-denial (enough to drive one mad, blind, dumb).
Surrounded by Baptist churches and peer-pressured into Young Life, such a world was familiar to me. I was taught at summer camp, for instance, that masturbation was a sin, though it was clearly somehow also funny if you were a dude. It was not funny if you were a girl.
One high school boyfriend, in response to my fierce jealousy (I’m as good at jealous as I am at shame), differentiated me from a pretty girl in my grade by explaining to me that I was the sexiest, and she was the cutest. That is a contest you just can’t rig, I thought at the time.
And it was a contest I could hear Shakira mocking. Her personas all seem to know that the men around her wanted a woman to say: hey, I will make you meals for free and blow your mind in bed, if only you stay faithful. Which, I’d argue, translates to, I will do your chores and you because I love you so much, and all you have to do is try to love me in return. Song-Shakiras usually recognize the absurdity of the patriarchal romance scheme. But they also recognize that understanding the absurdity doesn’t preclude one’s desire to be wanted in the first place.
so keep on reading the signs of my body
Two questions come up for me, at this point, and they both have to do with sexuality and authenticity.
If sexual desire is a cultural phenomenon, how can a girl entering puberty in a patriarchal (and evangelical) society learn how to “read the signs” of her body without first translating them, in her mind, for an audience?
If a female pop star is bound to be scrutinized for her sexual appeal, how can she reclaim agency while embracing the performativity necessary for market success? How can she balance her desirability with her personas’ open embrace of desire, along with all of the other “uglier” emotions that come with those wants?
“My Hips Don’t Lie” is a game of tension and release, lyrically and musically. When Shakira lauds “the attraction, the tension” as “perfection,” of course she’s singing explicitly about sexual tension (we’re doing this dance perfectly together), but I think she’s also singing about the tension of sexuality that she has experienced in a global, euro-centric, patriarchal market. It’s not just that she walks the line perfectly between being sexualized, objectified and confident, powerful: It’s almost as if is trying to draw the line, here, herself.
In her essay on the “My Hips Don’t Lie” music video, popular culture critic Anamaria Tamayo Duque writes: “Clearly, dance is the medium to get noticed and to establish some kind of agency and presence.” Her main argument is that Shakira purposefully manipulates the settings, costumes, and expressions of self in the video to represent different versions of corporeal identity. These different versions of self appeal to her vastly different global audiences—those in Barranquilla, Colombia, who felt betrayed by her international stardom; the Haitian and Colombian diasporas, as well as the larger Latino immigrant communities in the US; a euro-centric audience that would necessarily read the other presentations as “wild” and … and finally, a fourth “presentation,” that slides comfortably and easily between all of the former, holding the tension with ease.
And it’s that last presentation that I think I found so compelling as a young white woman, who had inherited euro-centric notions of beauty— and the patriarchal Christian enforcement of what a woman should and shouldn’t do with the scraps of sexual power I was allotted, literally, in my flesh.
si te vas, y me cambias/ Por esa bruja, pedazo de cuero
“Hips Don’t Lie” was released the semester I turned twenty-one, and I was studying abroad in Madrid. Stalking my former self, I realize that I named a quaint 2005-era Facebook album “Te Dejo Madrid <3,” complete with a smarmy emoji heart, after the only Spanish song on Laundry Service (of “Wherever, Whenever” fame). The collection features very few photos of the city, and rather a lot of my blurry face. I remember the digital Canon I would put in the clutch I’d take with me to the discotecas, how it would barely fit next to the compact powder and chunky international cell phone and the birth control pills. I’d have to be careful when opening the clutch in the disgusting bathrooms with their infinity mirrors, the beat to whatever electronic DJ set thumping in my throat.
When I could stand to examine myself in the harsh light, I could have also noted that I had: great hair, even when it was covered in sweat; what I never understood to be a flawless hourglass figure; and a smattering of hormonal acne on my cheeks. But when “My Hips Don’t Lie” came on, I wasn’t me or any of those rateable attributes, I was pure adrenaline, an unstoppable feminine goddess, doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do on the dance floor. Nothing about the way I moved was inauthentic. I’d throw my gorgeous hair back and move my shoulders in a groovy elliptical; my hips would follow suit. I didn’t need a man to see me to feel sexy; I was following my own wants. Drink, dance, love thyself. Shakira’s directives— Be wise, and keep on— seemed to open a portal into a shame-free dimension for me.
*
I will never forget a romantic rival in high school dissing me publically for my oily skin. To this day, I often lead with this descriptor of myself. I’m in my late thirties and I live my life in a desert with severely cracked ankles. But when I’m talking to cosmetic representatives, girls who want my money but who otherwise have no reason to try and ruin my “reputation,” I can hear Angela’s voice come out of my mouth as I say “my skin is just so oily.” Angela. What was her last name? There’s a special level in hell for women who are cruel to other women, Shakira said in a recent interview. And yet, her personas so often unabashedly diss her romantic rivals—Shakira is doing the same thing, in that very interview—, and they have done so, all the way back to Pies Descalzos and “No Te Vas,” a song in which she bitterly disregards her sexual competition as a pedazo de cuero. I have to hand it to Colombian slang: old leather is a vividly putrid way of describing a vagina that has gotten around.
God, I love that song, and I especially love that angry break in her voice, if you exchange me for that witch. If women share an unspoken covenant to protect each other from the shame game, we break that covenant too often: Angela, Shakira, and me, too. While I was always too scared/ ashamed to have sex, I could be awarded a special prize for the amount of friends’ crushes that I’ve kissed. I used to acknowledge this, at least a little, by describing myself, remorsefully, as a “horrible flirt.” A roommate in my early twenties joked about what she called my handful of “Christian sleepovers”; she was describing my special art of seduction that was unabashedly sexual but that also made it clear there would be no actual sex. Looking back at those years, at me groping through those discotecas, I can see that I was trying to rake in the ability to feel desire by attempting to collect others’.
In the long run, it didn’t work.
When I met my now husband, his insatiable desire for me gave me a high I thought I wasn’t capable of experiencing, one that had belonged to a version of me that had lived only fully in the dark corners on the dance floor. It’s hard to admit, but before him, I’d never felt and acted on my lust, fully, before—never acted without stopping myself, that is, either physically, by abruptly ending a sexual encounter, or mentally, by dissociating. And I only “went for it” with him because—why? I always say that I loved him from first sight, and I know that sounds straight out of a Shakira song (I am waiting for you, seated on the corner of forever), but it’s not a lie. Also, he had—has—this way of wanting all of me, and of sharing his want in a way that doesn’t make me try desperately to imagine myself being wanted from afar—like a star in a music video. Although admittedly, that is a game I still have to play with myself, sometimes.
no fighting
I took the clamshell of pills with me everywhere I went because they were supposed to help me with my acne and I didn’t want to miss a dose if I stayed out all night. I wasn’t having sex in Madrid, I just wanted to look like someone who was. I wanted the full power of my sexuality without any of the consequences. I wanted what one critic deemed Shakira’s personal brand of “innocent sensuality,” and I wanted it so badly that I dressed up as her for Halloween. More specifically, I dressed up as her hips, pinning a piece of computer paper to my skirt (which was indeed a scarf), saying something like, “I hereby certify the veracity of these hips.” I hope it was bilingual.
Wyclef Jean’s infamous “no fighting” throwaway lines are self-sampled—a cocky show of prowess—girls, don’t fight over me! Then quoting himself, “Girls, don’t fight over me!”The arrogance is infectious and reads with as much humor as it does pride. But the confidence of “Hips Don’t Lie” feels to me the most overwhelming tone, and I always took the command somewhat seriously: Do Not Pick Apart These Lyrics. The World’s a Dumpster Fire But This Song is Great. We’re Not Down, We’re Up. Just Move Your Hips. They’re Not Fuckin’ Around, Are They? No One Here is Trying to Steal Your Man. And so on, for a glorious three minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
With “Hips Don’t Lie” as my anthem that fall of 2005—how could it not have been; it was everywhere—the dance floors in Madrid felt like pure potential. This, I think, is what a good dance song should do to any of us—to all of us: take us out of our doldrums into an unadulterable euphoria, even if for only three minutes and thirty-eight seconds. As Duque puts it, “the lyrics emphasize the power of the body to convey the truth and assert her presence in a space,” something that, if a bit hard to explain, is something I think we can all recognize needing.
there’s nothing left to fear
I know that many singer-songwriters and pop stars before and since Shakira have entered their own answers to the unsolvable problems I’m bringing up here. I’m interested in Shakira specifically because of how she spoke to me in the dark; she found me first as an awkward, overly sexualized and scrutinized thirteen-year old (she's a perfect girl— she has perfect tits and a perfect ass, someone said of me in eighth grade), and she stayed with me through early adulthood. In the early 2000’s, when romcoms like Old School still pitted women you could marry against hotties wrestling in KY Jelly, Shakira in my car, on my iPod, at the club, was a balm.
I remembered that balm when I was preparing to give birth to my daughter in 2020: I made a playlist called “Strength" that ended up being 85% Shakira. It included her tongue-in-cheek “She Wolf”—“let her out!”; “Ciega Sordomuda,” with its own signature trumpet blazing, brass-ing her strength into my veins—if there’s one thing I won’t ever stop doing, it’s loving you; and of course, “My Hips Don’t Lie,” because if there’s anything I inherited from the women in my family, it was certainly good birthing hips.
And isn’t that something else Shakira is saying to us in “Hips Don’t Lie,” too?
Dudes can deify women's bodies. They can certainly shame them, attempt to control them via that shame, and they can definitively control them via (shameful & immoral) legislation—but all of those powers seem like a farce when you compare them to what women do: conceive, grow, and birth every human on the planet. Not a balm exactly, but it isn't a lie, either. Duque concludes her argument, giving me chills:
Shakira states over and over in the song that she has the truth, the authenticity, in her exotic body, and specifically in her hips. Even though this may be the claim of the song, it is not an issue of truth or authenticity because, if Shakira’s dancing body is the place of fluidity and multiplicity, it cannot be labeled authentic or true to anything. It will never be constructed as authentic but as continually shifting and ambiguous. Let us then keep on reading the signs of her body.
Shakira’s signature sensuality might be an impossible illusion, something her female fans will never be able to perform; but at least it gave me an ideal to strive toward that allowed a little room for myself. If I can see more clearly now, approaching my forties, and as mother of a mixed-race daughter, that I don’t want to be walking that line at all, I feel like I can thank her a little bit for that, too.
Citations
Cepeda, María Elena. "Shakira." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States: Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference.
Deluca, Dan. “Shakira’s World.” The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Duque, Anamaria Tamayo. “Body, Space, and Authenticity in Shakira’s Video for ‘My Hips Don’t Lie,’” The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture.
Lopez, Daniela Guitérrez. “(Dis)identifying with Shakira’s Global Body: A Path toward Rhythmic Affiliations beyond the Dichotomous Nation/Diaspora.” Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture, edited by Domino Renee Perez and Rachel González-Martin, Rutgers University Press, 2018, 152-174.
notes
[1] Shakira’s now ex-husband, a famous Barcelona football player
[2] In Lopez’s article on Shakira’s transnational identity, she notes that it wasn’t just the hair: Pre-Blond Shakira’s music was more outspokenly political, and after 1998, “Shakira became blond permanently…Through makeup (contouring) and lighting tricks that altered her skin tone, showcasing a paler hue, her features appeared slimmer….further accommodating Euro-American standards of beauty…”
[3] If you need a primer on the relationship gossip, and the way the press talks about Shakira always in the same breath as shame/shade, here’s this from a People article: “But despite their efforts to remain under the radar, the couple made headlines after Shakira seemingly shaded their relationship in two songs, "BZRP Music Session #53" and "TQG."”
Sara Sams is a writer and translator from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her first book of poems, Atom City, is about growing up in the Manhattan Project town and the militarization of science that made creating the atomic bomb possible. When she wants to dance away her lifelong grief about the former, she often turns to Shakira. She lives in Tucson with her family and teaches at the University of Arizona. You can find more of her creative work at saraesams.com.
STEPHANIE AUSTIN ON P!NK’S “GET THE PARTY STARTED”
We were in the back of a cab—it’s late 2001 or early 2002, cabs were all we had—me, this girl I’ll call Carla who was a fleeting friend of my roommate, and a guy I’ll call John because I think his actual name was John but John is a generic enough name no one will recognize him, and maybe my roommate, who might have been sitting in the front seat with the driver or she might have left me at the bar after her boyfriend showed up. Both scenarios had happened, and I do not recall which scenario we were in that night. Carla and John used to work together but didn’t work together anymore. Carla had a thing for John during the entirety of their working relationship, and they kept in touch, and Carla knew John would be at Maloney’s so Carla wanted my roommate and I to go with her to find John for the express purpose of hooking up with him. Carla and I put on our *power party shirts. (Both power shirts were mine.) We were at Carla’s place before the bar. I brought two power party shirts over with me. An orange and white striped halter, and the red, off the shoulder business with the sparkle flames going up the side. I let Carla pick first. She wanted the red one. No bra. Can’t wear a bra with a shirt like that. You’re not supposed to want to wear a bra with a shirt like that. I sat behind the passenger seat, Carla sat behind the driver seat, and John was between us. John was kissing Carla, and John had his hand on my leg. We pulled up to the apartment I was living in at the time, and I put my hand on the door to get out. John took his hand off my leg, reached across me for the door I was about to open and said, “You don’t have to go.”
What’s a power party shirt? They’re sleeveless. Skintight. Shirts full of sparkles and color or black or white. Back then, they were all one-shoulder or halter-top style. Maybe they are again. People don’t come back, but fashion always does. You wore your power party shirt to the bars without a jacket in the winter. You screamed about how cold you were. Maybe you had a guy or two or three scream back at you to “put on a coat!” But you know, and I know, those guys didn’t actually want you to put on a coat. When you are 22 you cannot—ahem—start parties when you have a coat on. You need skin. You need a power party shirt for the skin. Watch P!nk in her video for “Get the Party Started”. She tries on a lot of tops. What’s the top she wears to the Club? A white tank over a bright orange mesh that shows abs and skin. What’s the top she wears in the Club? A black tank with clear straps so that it looks like a tub top. Her friend? In a white tank with black spider-web like mesh around the shoulders. Shoulders and skin.
Someone on Twitter (X) tweeted (posted/exed) that he was “today years old” when he realized that P!nk’s song “Get the Party Started” from her album Missundaztood was about drugs. Drugs? No. I get the inclination. She opens with that giggle. That tease. That shot on its way into the mixer. That pill on the way down. That line on the counter. The long I’m. Comin’ up. A command: So you better. A battle cry: Get this party started. The beat wiggles into your brain. I offer you the following: “Get the Party Started” is an herbal salve. Makes you forget yourself—what’s been done to you, what you’ve done to others. Which is all anyone wants.
Look. I’ll say it. My headspace during this time in the backseat of the cab wasn’t awful but it wasn’t great. A few years of turbulence—toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences—and I was working in a job I liked but that didn’t pay well (actual story of my life) and all my old friends—the ones I hadn’t alienated—had moved away after college, so I had to find new friends, new roommates. I was on the cusp of a few life-altering decisions, but I hadn’t made them yet. The series of toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences was a response to the series of toxic men, bad choices, worse consequences that my parents had led me through. We fight against and live within our family of origin. The sickly-good comfort we find in repeating emotional patterns is the worst kind of addiction. Less than a year before I sat inside that cab, I was teetering on the edge of complete self-destruction. Not an exaggeration. I was on a cliff, a foot in the air, eyes closed. All I had to do was tilt forward. I wanted to tilt forward and fall all the way. But for whatever reason, I stopped. I sat down, army crawled away from the ledge where I found Linda Perry (4NonBlondes, super producer and songwriter) and P!nk holding their arms open to me.
Perry said the song was unlike anything she’d produced, and P!nk, who performed it, said it was unlike anything she’d put out at the time. P!nk was coming off the massive success of Can’t Take Me Home, which was rooted more in R&B, and Missundaztood, was rooted more in dance-pop--oops-you’re-in-therapy.
Earlier that night, the three of us—Carla, me, roommate—scoured Maloney’s for John. No such things as regular cell phones, texting. In my day, you had to lap the bar 45 times until you found the person you needed/wanted. In my memory, John was plowed, but the bar was dark and crowded and full of smoke. I had a few drinks but don’t remember being drunk. I was annoyed. I didn’t want to be out anymore, and yet, out I was. I didn’t want to be involved in drama, and yet I was. Carla was tall and very thin with shoulder-length blonde hair. John was all right. I can’t picture his face anymore, but I think it was a generic, attractive male face. In my mind, his haircut was basic, and he wore a flannel and khakis but so did every other guy in Flagstaff at the time. We found him, and I remember—clearly—he didn’t have hot friends—and I remember Carla took off with John and I remember after the way Carla hyped John all night when I saw him I was like, no. Who I was looking for that night? Probably no one. Probably I was nervous about running into people who had injured me and/or who I had injured. Maloney’s then did the thing where it turned off the music and played scenes from Animal House and everyone liked that. Animal House clips were a hit.
P!nk released “Get the Party Started” in October 2001, a date I had to double check. Were we releasing dance-pop so soon in a post 9/11 world? The answer is yes. In my mind, the only music on the radio at the end of 2001 was that Lee Greenwood song but anyway, yes, so, we were indeed interested in getting the party started again in late 2001, and P!nk delivered. I bought the CD at Hastings—we were in the Napster era of streaming/Hastings was all we had—and listened to the entire thing expecting more upbeat and fun music. Imagine how I felt then bumping into “Just Like A Pill” and “Numb” and “Family Portrait.” P!nk said in a Behind the Music that she called her family together to listen to the album. Ballsy. In “Family Portrait,” a song I had on repeat for years and still consider a sacred text she sings, “I don’t want love to destroy me like it did my family.” And then you play that for your family? P!nk and I are the same in that sense. I mean, I wrote my version of “Family Portrait” but I waited until my dad died. So he never read my book about him. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t still ballsy! P!nk offered you a bop, then made you, me, and all of us look at our fucking lives and choices. “Get the Party Started” lets everyone around you know you’re about to fuck some shit up, and that shit is your family, your toxic relationships, and your own goddamn self.
I didn’t stay. I got out of the cab, and the next morning, sitting outside smoking with my roommate, I told her about it. I smoked and I coughed and I smoked. Again, was this what I wanted? After everything, am I still sitting outside choking on the same gross cigarettes I hated when my parents smoked them? My roommate said she bet John thought he was going to have a threesome. No way, I said. I gave him no indication of any such thing—but hey, men. We called Carla for the down low, but she didn’t answer. We called later that afternoon. No answer. Was she dead? No, but she avoided us. My roommate bumped into her somewhere and got the gist of the story. They didn’t hook up. Carla was pissed, and she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Somehow it was our fault? My fault. She refused to give me my shirt back. I left a few messages, the last one, if you played it back now, textbook cringe. Me, angry, “you have my property” and my roommate, in the background, shouting about calling the police. The entire scene was a regression.
“Get the Party Started” is dance-pop, yes. It was, at that point, P!nk’s biggest selling song because it’s boppy and fun, however, the song digs in, goes deeper. “…Party” is a cleaning song. Motivation to get your house in order. It’s wild, highlighted with bright colors, power party shirts, and exists as a way in so you can find your way out. Me? I packed up my room at the apartment, made tenuous arrangements to crash at my dad’s place in Phoenix for awhile. My dad’s place he shared with my stepmother, who did not want me to crash at all, who told my dad who told me she was afraid I was coming to Phoenix to party and leech off them. My dad said, “So, uh, don’t do that, ok?” And if you know my dad, you’d know my dad telling me not to party or fuck up my life anymore than I already had and bring other people around me down was rich. My roommate decided to leave, too. We didn’t get our security deposit back.
I carried/still carry P!nk with me. She understands the only way to put yourself back together is to first rip yourself apart. You’re going to put on your best party shirt. You’re going to invite your friends, drink your shots, laugh and scream your mantra. And then, when you’ve had too much and you throw up and your throat is raw and you’re desperately thirsty, you’re going to start the real work.
Stephanie Austin is the author of the chapbook SOMETHING I MIGHT from WTAW Press. Follow her wherever you get your socials: Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram and her Substack, Something I Might Say. You can read more of her work at her website: stephanieaustin.net