Songoftheday 2/3/23 - Sendin' out the message to all of my friends, we'll be lookin' flashy in my Mercedes Benz...

 

 

"Get The Party Started" - Pink

from the album Missundaztood (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (six weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 21

 

Today's song comes from singer Alecia Moore, aka Pink (or "P!nk"), whose R&B-pop fusion debut album Can't Take Me Home had spun off a pair of top ten pop hits with "There You Go" and "Most Girls" along with a top-40 follow-up on "You Make Me Sick".  But what really raised her profile from the myriad of "pop tarts" flooding the market was her appearance on the collab remake of the disco classic "Lady Marmalade" with Christina Aguilera, Mya, and Lil' Kim, which went all the way to #1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the summer of 2001. With this momentum, and clout from the #1 hit, Pink used that to get more leverage on her sophomore effort Missundaztood. The singer partnered with singer/songwriter Linda Perry, who was at that time best known for her one-hit wonder single "What's Up" in 1993. The pair would write six of the fourteen tracks on the set, with Perry alone penning a couple more, with LaFace standby Dallas Austin handling another four (possibly to hedge bets?). Perry wrote and produced the lead single from the album, "Get The Party Started", originally meant for Madonna (however I'm sure Madge thought the party track was beneath her at that point). A bright and flashy track about getting ready to go out to the club, it has some R&B "bling" attitude from the start about checking her car and her jewelry, but that's layered onto a bouncy synth-pop beat that's far from "soul music". Of course thirty-something me was all into this, thinking it was the best bop in years, though time has made it a bit dated. Still, it's hella fun, Pink is all into it, and with a eye-catching music video that showed the singer as a tinged blonde instead of the neon pink gimmick MTV helped made this make Pink at least a B+-lister for the moment...

 

 "Get The Party Started" became P!nk's fourth top ten pop hit on the Hot 100 in December of 2001. On the radio, the single made it to #2 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, #16 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, and #3 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic station list. The remixes of the track helped it land Pink's first #1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart for a week. Internationally, the single topped the charts in Spain, Australia, Ireland, Belgium (Wallonia), New Zealand, and Romania, and reached the top ten in the United Kingdom (#2), Germany (#2), Italy (#2), Austria (#2), Denmark (#2), Switzerland (#2), Norway (#2), Sweden (#3), Finland (#3), France (#4), Hungary (#4), Croatia (#4), the Netherlands (#5), Belgium (Flanders, #5), and Greece (#10), and almost made it in Canada (#11). The Missundaztood album, released in November of that year, peaked at #6 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over five million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, "Get The Party Started" was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, losing to Norah Jones for her "Don't Know Why" ballad. Missundaztood was also up for Best Pop Vocal Album (in a field of all female-led acts), but again it went home with Norah for Come Away With Me. Both P!nk and the album will be back to the series.

(8/10)

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Here's an edit of the "P!nk Noise Disco Mix" that helped the song top the dance chart...

Next up, live on The Tonight Show in 2001...

On her 2007 tour, she used the alternate "Sweet Dreams" mix on the single which incorporated the Eurythmics hit as she did some major circus acrobatics...

That same year, the British retail chain Marks & Spencer commissioned English vocal pop legend Shirley Bassey to cover the song in a James Bond style for their holiday TV commercial. The result went to #47 on the British singles charts but the remix climbed all the way to #3 on the American Dance Club Play list, and it actually aged better than even Pink's version...

Fast forward to Pink's 2017 tour....

Finally, on her Beautiful Trauma tour in 2019, the singer climbed a swinging chandelier...

I'll be back Monday with a sanctimonious Christian hard rock band.