When Shellback was a teenager, he had a solo black metal project called Meriah. Like Max Martin before him, Shellback came up in metal, though his version of metal wasn’t anything like the Bon Jovi-type stuff that Martin made in his old band It’s Alive. Karl Johan Schuster, better known to the world as Shellback, is another Swede. Instead, Martin and Pink co-wrote the track with another Martin protege. “So What,” the song that took Pink to #1, is a Max Martin track, but Martin didn’t make it with Dr. Pink said that she didn’t know what had happened between Luke and Kesha but that Luke, in her experience, was “not a good person… I have told him that to his face, and I do not work with him.” Pink has kept working with Max Martin consistently over the years, but she never did anything with Dr. Years later, Kesha, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, accused Luke of all kinds of abuses. Those two hits fueled a major Pink comeback, and they set her up nicely for the moment when Max Martin and Dr.

Pink recorded “So What” when she was going through a heavy time, but she still turned the song into a fists-up singalong. There’s some serious emotional stuff happening on “So What,” but the song remains big and bright and silly. Anyway, the line about being a rock star isn’t really the point of “So What.” Instead, it’s a song about going on a hedonistic bender after a bad breakup. At this point, Pink hasn’t had a massive chart hit in a while, but she can still pack arenas whenever she wants. Pink has had a long, strange career, but she’s a remarkably consistent presence. When Pink calls herself a rock star on “So What,” the “rock” part might be up for debate, but the “star” part is not. In an era when rock stars were becoming an endangered species, maybe Pink reflected some new evolution of the term. But everything that Pink did in those days was some type of provocation. Maybe Pink was being deliberately provocative when she called herself a rock star on “So What,” her first solo chart-topper. As soon as she reached the point where she could assert some career control, though, Pink reinvented herself as a husky-voiced growler of hard emotional truths - something not altogether unlike a rock star.

Pink first rose to fame by making R&B-adjacent teen pop in the Destiny’s Child mode, and she’s never really gotten play on rock radio. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.ĭoes Pink count as a rock star? The term “rock star” has been basically meaningless for as long as I can remember, so I don’t have a problem with Pink claiming rock-star status, especially in the year after the Shop Boyz’ “Party Like A Rock Star” and Nickelback’s “Rockstar” were both top-10 hits.

Panic Girls by Austin Star