Album: Pink

There are moments on I'm Not Dead when Pink suggests she may be able to offer a version of Girl Power which goes deeper than mere marketing tag-lines - most notably on the single "Stupid Girls", a splendid put-down of dime-store celebrocracy, in which she revels in her iconoclasm and professes a liking for "outcasts and girls with ambition". Then in the next breath, she'll slip into a drab power-ballad that confirms suspicions that she's just another rock-chick minus the big hair.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, with sulky-girl songs like " Leave Me Alone" and the cringeworthy "Conversations With My 13 Year Old Self" pinning down the Avril Lavigne demographic. A similar sort of ambivalence applies to her sexual attitudes, with the female masturbation anthem "Fingers" ("I let my fingers do the walking") in sharp contrast to the contempt visited upon male fantasists in "Centerfold" and the lap-dancer's put-down "U + Ur Hand". The last is one of several songs celebrating a ruthlessly materialist morality, which undercuts her ticking-off of "Dear Mr. President", surely the gauchest song of the year.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Stupid Girls', 'Fingers', 'U + Ur Hand'

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