Pink/Elvis Presley/Lulu

Lulu “Oh Me Oh My” (Television performance)

Pink “Misery” (Studio)

I was on an errand to Best Buy (searching for something called an HDMI cable which was needed for the completion of a secret mission which has now been brought to fruition–freedom in the West will continue). Decided to browse the CD section while I was on my way to the checkout and found Alecia Beth Moore’s second album (Missundaztood) and the new legacy edition combo of Elvis Presley’s first two albums both on sale.

I’m at the end of a mad summer so I couldn’t resist picking up both.

Moore, for those who don’t know, is a YWF (young white female) singer who has been having hits under her professional name, Pink, for more than a decade and, though it’s a decidedly faint-praise category, she has probably received more critical accolades in her own time than any solo YWF not named Janis Joplin in the history of critical accolades (which for rock purposes, stretches back nearly half a century to about the time of Joplin’s first records). Just as a for-instance, Robert Christgau, the “dean of American rock critics,” has graded three of Pink’s albums at A- or higher…which is three times as many A- or higher grades as he has ever given Linda Ronstadt, Tanya Tucker, Brenda Lee, Jackie DeShannon and Patty Loveless combined. Though I find such complete abdications of critical responsibility to be extremely bizarre and more than a little depressing, I have to admit he’s far from alone.

For the record, I like Pink just fine and, driving around town today, I discovered that I liked her second album just fine, too.

On her up and mid-tempo numbers, I have to confess I still can’t distinguish her from Britney or Christina or Miley or any number of other YWFs or, for that matter, from any number of BWFs, all of whom I also like just fine.

On her ballads, where I assume she sounds something like herself, she also sounds remarkably, at times even eerily, like Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, who, under her professional name, Lulu, is one of my absolute favorites in the category of singers who were pretty big but should have been a whole lot bigger.

Between purchasing Missundaztood in conjunction with Elvis’ first RCA efforts (from 1956) and cottoning to the Lulu connection, I was maybe a little more inclined than usual to hear history in the background of what I suspect would otherwise have been an unremarkable encounter with a perfectly fine, newly purchased album by a catchy modern singer.

One thought that occurred is that Pink is supposed to represent the success of the revolution.

She’s got attitude. She’s got tatttoes. She’s sexually aggressive. She dyes her hair to match the color scheme on Elvis’ famous first album cover. She’s nobody’s idea of a pushover. She’s her own woman. She can even use words like “bitch” and “ass” and make them sound almost unforced and natural. Almost like something she would say every day even if there was nobody to impress, which, believe me, is no small feat given as how no punk, rapper or member of the modern intelligentsia I’ve heard (admittedly a long way from all of them) has ever managed it despite an absolute, almost comical, persistence in trying.

All fine…except that she was twenty-one when she made this particular album, had been a star for a couple of years already, and was trying desperately–and successfully, particularly in the songs that mention World War III and Vietnam–to pass for sixteen.

Just for comparison’s sake, the album Lulu made at twenty-one, and at the height of the revolution, was called New Routes. (Christgau was around, he might have reviewed it. He didn’t, which means he didn’t think it was worth reviewing–a lot of rock critics have to get pretty old before they think young women can teach them anything).

By the time she recorded New Routes, Lulu had been wrapped in the cocoon of show-biz success herself for half a decade.

And she didn’t exactly sound like an old woman, but she did sound like an adult.

Enough like an adult, for instance, to directly inspire no less than Aretha Franklin to cover “Oh Me, Oh My,” the album’s modest hit single–and also enough like an adult to keep even Aretha Franklin from catching her.

Just for further comparison’s sake, Elvis recorded the material for his first RCA album when he was twenty (some of it was left over from his stretch at Sun)–and he also sounded like an adult, if also like a bit of an eager beaver.

For all the constant dissing of rock and roll–then and now–as “teen” music, there was, in fact, no part of the revolution that encouraged perfectly intelligent and gifted young people to pretend they were younger than they were.

And while I haven’t heard any of Pink’s other albums, I have heard most of her hit singles, including her latest, recorded when the was on the north side of thirty, and, as far as I can tell, she’s still trying to sound sixteen. To be fair, it’s a measure of the rock and roll revolution’s present failure (I never give up on the future) that intelligent, gifted young women now seem to have little choice if they want to be played on the radio.

There are, after all, always plenty of photogenic women who actually are sixteen waiting to step in and take your place, and modern recording values make actual talent–which Pink certainly has, though I’d rank her a bit short of Lulu (and a bit further short of the other women I mentioned)–something of a non-issue.

That’s a long way from how it started.

The early “girl group” singers were mostly teenagers, yet, to a woman, the really great ones all sounded like old souls–and like no one else.

Maybe on some of her other albums, Pink does, too. God knows we’ve been told over and over that she has the biography for it. But on this one–her most lauded–I didn’t hear a trace of anything that truly sets her apart.

And yeah, hearing her in conjunction with Elvis (the man who gave so many racists of all colors so many new boundaries to defend) and Lulu (a white singer who, when the revolution was still more or less on track, got responses from the likes of Aretha Franklin and Al Green that we are now frequently told by the new reactionaries no white singer can ever get from any black person–if you can track down a copy of Green explaining to NPR’s flabbergasted Terry Gross how taken he was with “To Sir With Love,” you’ll hear what I mean), I had thoughts about the history of black-face, too.

They involved Alecia Beth Moore being the very sort of young woman who, if she had been born a hundred years earlier, might have passed herself off as a boy so she could join a minstrel show.

But there might be a novel in that some day, so I’m gonna to leave that one alone…at least until I can figure out whether or not it should involve a time machine.