Pink – Interview

Pink’s video for “Stupid Girls” is all about how fake celebrities can be, so it makes perfect sense that not everything in the video is real either — including co-star 50 Cent.

“I live in L.A., so it’s obvious what I’m surrounded by…. I don’t need to name names,” Pink said recently (see “Pink Would Rather Fall Off A Car Than Get Glammed Up For Her Videos”), discussing how the song was inspired by how vapid Hollywood can be, and how young girls should aspire to more than their pop-culture role models represent.

In the Dave Meyers-directed clip for “Stupid Girls,” then, Pink’s surrounded by superficiality, and includes references to Paris Hilton’s sex tape, Jessica Simpson’s music videos, Mary-Kate Olsen’s boho shopping sprees and Lindsay Lohan’s car crashes. Pink reenacts them all as parody, falling off the hood of a soaped-up car and later crashing into pedestrians while on her cell phone, bothered only by the fact that it distracts her from applying more lip gloss. She shops at Fred Segal, buys a little accessory dog (touted to “stay younger longer”) and tries to throw up in the restroom after boasting how few calories she can subsist on.

When Pink’s not pretending to be these and other starlets, she plays herself, as she wonders if she should try to fit in — starting with her breast size. A special tab on her shirt, labeled “Pull in case of emergency,” inflates her breasts while out on a date. She lies on a plastic surgeon’s table with dotted lines marking other areas that could be modified. She runs on a treadmill at the gym as she tears off her clothes in an effort to keep up with the exercise-aholics next to her (with her “Die Hipster Scum” T-shirt giving away how she really feels).

PINK

The problem, Pink surmises, is that if we waste our time, money and energy on trying to be someone else’s idea of fabulous, we waste our potential to be something better. Our priorities are askew, our ambitions misplaced. “What happened to the dream of a girl president? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent,” Pink sings, as she dances next to a man who looks a lot like (but isn’t really) 50 Cent.

Throughout the vignettes, a little girl sits holding her Barbie doll and channel surfs between TV shows on etiquette lessons and a political campaign (with Pink at the lectern). A Pink angel and a Pink devil appear on either side of her shoulders, planting thoughts in the girl’s head to pull her in different directions, causing her to wonder along to Pink’s lyrics, “Maybe if I act like that? … Push up my bra like that?”

Ultimately she decides, “I don’t want to be a stupid girl,” and forgoes her Barbie doll to play with a football instead.

“There’s a certain thing the world is being fed,” Pink said, “and my point is there should be a choice.”