IT CAN BE pretty easy to forget about some of Pink’s earlier work.

When’s the last time the lyrics “There you go, lookin’ PITIFUL, just because I let you go” crossed your mind? Do you even remember the video? It was like a TLC song, set in a bizarrely erotic skatepark.

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And what about ‘You Make Me Sick’? God be with the days when Pink’s hair was actually pink.

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If we move forward a couple of years past Pink’s surprisingly appealing catalogue of R&B tunes, we have her 2001 album Missundaztood, which marks the very beginning of her career as the Jacqueline Wilson of pop music in the first decade of this millennium.

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Avril Lavigne’s album Let Go wasn’t released until a year later, so for a brief period at the turn of the century, this was the quintessential angsty pop album of the time.

Pink used it to distance herself from who the public perceived her to be after her appearance in Lady Marmalade. The album dealt with a host of topics from the Vietnam War (seriously) to drug abuse, the effects of divorce on children and mental health. Some of the songs that didn’t manage to make it as singles include ‘Dear Diary’, ‘Lonely Girl’, ‘Numb’ and ‘Misery’.

Pink was 22 years old when Missundaztood came out, but she was writing music for every angry and hormonal 13-year-old kid who owned a disc-man and painted their nails black in the year 2001. This was also, pretty much, Jacqueline Wilson’s target audience too.

The first single from Missundaztood was ‘Don’t Let Me Get Me’.

In this song, Pink recounts how her parents hated her, her teachers were grooming her, how she doesn’t feel like she’ll ever be as pretty as Britney Spears and how she is ultimately her own worst enemy and often a hazard to herself.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an adolescent in the year 2001 who could not relate to at least one of those issues. In the music video, she looks at herself in the mirror and asks if there’s a doctor who can prescribe her something that will help with how shit she feels about her life.

You’d be even more hard-pressed to find another popstar around that time who was so unashamed of being open about their personal issues and mental health. However, if you were to find someone speaking candidly, to their audience of young people, about these issues around that time… It’d probably be a certain children’s author.

Next up, we had ‘Just Like a Pill’.

You knew things were about to get deep when you saw that Pink had dyed her hair (which many people believed to be her namesake) black.

In the year 2001, if a song had any mention of crying on the floor, it was automatically a hit with young people. This song was no exception. Like plenty of Jacqueline Wilson books, this song examined unhealthy relationships.

Very few of Pink’s contemporaries were screaming about how they had to run away from a relationship that was making them sick.

And then ‘Family Portrait’ was released.

Looking at conflict between parents through the perspective of a child? Enough said, really.

A few years later, Pink released ‘Who Knew’.

Even in 2006, she was slipping social problems into her songs. It’s not explicitly mentioned in the lyrics, but this video features a teenager ditching his girlfriend at a carnival so he can go off and take heroin.

At some stage after this, Pink eventually veered off of Jacqueline Wilson’s path and instead got really interested in acrobatics and all that Cirque du Soleil stuff.

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