On 
her 
seventh 
studio 

album, P!nk nears 21st century 
pop 
perfection. 
The 
lovably 

spunky singer’s latest release, 
Beautiful Trauma, delivers to 
fans all of P!nk’s characteristic 

contradictions; it’s joyful and it’s 
angry, it’s bright and it’s dark, 
it’s beautiful and it’s traumatic. 
Some music connoisseurs may be 
skeptical of the singer’s raw pop, as 
some tracks lack substance and are 
plagued by love song cliches, but 
even the snobbiest of music snobs 
won’t be able to resist stomping 
their feet to Beautiful Trauma’s 
energetic anthems and indulging 

in the album’s moving ballads.

From the get-go, the Beautiful 

Trauma’s 
titular 
track 
sets 

the tone of the record with an 
irresistible pop anthem. The song 
has everything a pop track needs: 
a strong chord progression, an 
empowering beat and a melody 
dynamic enough to be musically 
engaging while anthemic enough 
to be a sing-along. When the 

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, October 25, 2017 — 5A

RCA

P!nk returns with ‘Beautiful Trauma’
New ‘Beautiful Trauma’ is 
P!nk with her perfect pop

Angry, bright, dark and poppy — P!nk’s back and better than ever

MIKE WATKINS

For the Daily

chorus hits, it’s pop — it’s slightly 
corny, but it’s good.

P!nk also took a page out of 

the 21st Century female pop 
star playbook by featuring a 
traditionally 
rough-around-the-

edges rapper to give the album’s 
second track some grit (e.g. Taylor 
Swift’s “Bad Blood,” with Kendrick 
Lamar). In this case, that rapper 
is Eminem. The track “Revenge” 
features an infallible “My Name 
Is”-esque hip hop beat blended 
with modern synths to develop 
an overall bright sound, one that 
contradicts the song’s lyrics that 
depict a messy and unhealthy 
relationship, an interesting and 
slightly comical technique that 
both P!nk and Eminem have 
deployed in the past. The song is a 
head-bouncer, and Eminem’s verse 
approaches The Marshall Mathers 
LP-level crudeness with the final 
line, “You’re a whore. You’re a 
whore. This is war.” P!nk did not 
miss on Revenge by bringing on the 
king of brutally honest tracks about 
relationship struggles.

Another 
interesting 

characteristic 
of 
Beautiful 

Trauma is its current relevance. 
P!nk 
manages 
to 
extrapolate 

turbulence within a relationship 
to turbulence within the United 
States in 2017. “What About Us” is 
both a meditation on a struggling 
couple and an analysis of modern 
political and social turmoil. In the 
second verse, P!nk sings, “We are 
problems that want to be solved 
/ We are children that need to be 
loved / We were willin’, we came 
when you called / But man, you 

fooled us, enough is enough.” 
In the context of a pop song, a 
listener could take these lines as 
a description of broken promises 
and 
disappointment 
within 
a 

relationship, but P!nk’s use of 
the words “we” and “children” 
hints at a deeper meaning, one 
that relates to a nation of people 
looking for answers. As Billboard 
writer Patrick Crowley notes, P!nk 
has not shied away from political 
commentary in the past, as she 
actively shared her objection to 
the white supremacist rallies in 
Virginia and was vocal about her 

support for Hillary Clinton. “[I]t’s 
not far-fetched to think that the 
double meaning was intentional,” 
Crowley wrote, and in a time of 
racial struggle and frustration over 
political inaction, P!nk deserves 
some credit for making music 
bigger than herself.

Now, do not be mistaken — 

Beautiful Trauma certainly has 
its cliche moments, but what 
pop album doesn’t? In the track 
“Whatever You Want,” the line, 
“I feel like a ship’s going down 
tonight, but it’s always darkest 
before the light,” will have many 
listeners groaning and rolling their 
eyes, and unfortunately there is 
no shortage of these cheesy lines 

throughout the album. P!nk can get 
away with these eye-roll-inducing 
lines, though, because her brand 
is essentially relatable heartbreak, 
and there is little one can do to 
avoid sounding corny or mushy 
when meditating on love and its 
consequences. As a listener, just 
remember that pop with a universal 
appeal has its base consequences, 
and take P!nk’s shallow lyricism 
with a grain of salt.

Beautiful Trauma has another 

cliche characteristic, but this one is 
less likely to make listeners cringe. 
P!nk sprinkles her album with 
classic, heart-string-pulling ballads 
that reveal the singer’s status as 
more than just a pop star, and 
exhibit her expertise as a vocalist. 
These slower, piano-driven songs 
may be basic and slightly hackneyed, 
but they speak on the ever-relatable 
topic of the struggle for love by 
including some of the shallow but 
accessible lyrics aforementioned, 
and P!nk’s impressive vocal range 
and emotional vulnerability make 
these songs even more powerful. 
The love-ballad is alive and well on 
Beautiful Trauma.

From top to bottom, P!nk’s latest 

release is a well strung together pop 
project. The pleasantly abrasive 
pop star successfully delivers to her 
listeners a unique blend of grit, love 
and political commentary, a breath 
of fresh air in today’s pop music 
world. With relatable content, 
invigorating 
beats, 
exciting 

features and P!nk’s undeniable 
talent, Beautiful Trauma is worth 
the listen for both pop-lovers and 
pop-skeptics.

SYFY

It’s a bad show
‘Superstition’ is laughable

Series combines bad acting and bad visuals to make a bad show

At the risk of sounding overly 

cynical, I hope I’m not the only 
one who has ever watched a 
series and immediately thought, 
“Wow, this absolutely sucks.” 
It’s only happened a few times 
(see: “Taken”), but it’s almost 
comical when it does. To have 
such a glaringly and obviously 
terrible show is hilarious to me 
— it always leads me to try and 
imagine simply how and why 
the series was greenlit in the 
first place. I mention all of this, 
of course, because this was my 
exact reaction upon screening 
the pilot of Syfy’s “Superstition.”

At 
the 
time 
I 
watched 

“Superstition” ’s excuse of a 
premiere, I was in a sort-of 
shitty mood from our loss to 
Penn State Saturday evening. 
I was exhausted, down and, to 
top it off, my buddies at Penn 
State were flooding my phone 
with texts about their blowout 
victory. I needed a reprieve from 
my grief and, oddly enough, 
I 
found 
that 
much-needed 

shot 
of 
optimism 
through 

“Superstition.” As I settled in 
and began taking notes during 
my viewing, I had to force myself 
to stop ripping every element of 
the show because it was getting 
exhausting. Instead, I took a 
more 
entertaining 
approach 

and started focusing on how 
hilariously bad this episode is, 
but even that wasn’t enough 
to redeem this masterpiece in 
garbage television.

For “Superstition,” its issues 

are rooted in its downright awful 
writing. The series is centered 
around the occult experiences of 
the Hastings family, who operate 
a funeral home in a quaint 

Georgian town. Aside from the 
overdone Southern gothic trope, 
this basic idea isn’t awful in and 
of itself, but its already weak 
storyline is hardly propped up 
by its dialogue, which is stiff and 
awkwardly phrased.

In one especially horrific 

scene, 
the 
town 
sheriff, 

Officer Westbrook (Demetria 
McKinney, “House of Payne”), 
speaks at a murder scene to 
a local Satanist, who claims 
to Westbrook: “We brought 
this 
upon 
ourselves, 
Chief 

Westbrook.” The line was so 
forced and cringe-worthy that 

I had to restrain myself from 
doubling over with laughter. 
In what world does a regular 
person, let alone a Satanist, call 
a police officer “Chief”? Maybe 
I’m harping on one word, but 
the entire line reeks of being 
one of the most boring and 
awkward-sounding things I’ve 
heard on television in a while. 
And that’s saying something 
considering that I saw the trailer 
for “Geostorm” this morning.

Next on the laundry list 

of 
problems 
inherent 
in 

“Superstition” is, like most bad 
television, its “acting.” In fact, 
the only actual acting happening 
in the series is its cast pretending 
that they’re actors — yes, it’s that 
terrible. Playing the Hastings 
family patriarch, Mario Van 
Peebles (“New Jack City”) is 
entirely unconvincing in his 

plethora of clichéd wisdom and 
obvious desire to be a cop in 
another life. As the prodigal son 
returning home, Brad James 
(“For Better or Worse”) isn’t able 
to arouse any sort of emotion 
or sympathy for his character 
from the audience. Rounding 
out its utterly disastrous cast 
is McKinney, whose tone-deaf 
performance begs us to ask why 
Hollywood assigns police officer 
roles indiscriminately.

As awful as its acting remains, 

“Superstition” ’s visuals are 
somehow nearly just as bad. 
Armed with a camera that I 
would guess is from the 18th 
century, the series offers zero 
sense of visual appeal. With 
hardly 
any 
exterior 
shots, 

“Superstition” seems perfectly 
content to stay indoors, despite 
its bland set design. Exemplified 
by the Hastings house, the 
sets of each scene are hastily 
and 
generically 
generated, 

causing me to believe that the 
only research the writers did 
for this show was to read “To 
Kill a Mockingbird” and hope 
that Southern stereotypes of 
grandfather clocks and creaky 
mansions were still in-vogue.

Witnessing 
such 
blatant 

indolence 
in 
Hollywood 

astounds even me, but it also 
makes me glad that sites like 
Rotten Tomatoes exist to give 
each new movie or show a 
single, simple review score so 
as to punish these lazy artists 
and push viewers and their 
dollars 
away. 
If 
Hollywood 

hasn’t learned its lesson about 
lazy 
stereotypes 
yet, 
I’m 

(unfortunately) not sure it ever 
will, but at least audiences can 
steer clear of “Superstition” and 
let Hollywood’s latest small-
screen blunder fall flat on its 
Satanic face.

“Superstition”

Series premiere

Fridays at 10 p.m.

Syfy

CONNOR GRADY

Daily Arts Writer

NETFLIX

People smoke pipes in ‘1922’
‘1922’ has potential but 
fails to land a decent blow

Stephen King’s ‘1922’ gets the Netflix treatment to mixed results

The last line, “In the end we all 

get caught,” of Netflix’s new horror 
film “1922,” sums up the film’s 
takeaway in one sentence. The 
movie, based on the Stephen King 
novel, the line, spoken by Wilfred 
James, the protagonist, (Thomas 
Jane, “The Mist”), embodies a 
central theme: You can’t get away 
with murder. Despite Wilfred 
James’s evasion of the law, he is 
ultimately unable to avoid his guilt 
and delusions, putting himself in 
a sort of mental prison. Wilfred 
eventually comes to represent the 
paranoia that manifests from the 
guilt after a crime, in his case, the 
gruesome murder of his wife while 
she’s in a blurred drunken state.

The film opens up without 

hesitation to begin the exposition 
of Wilfred’s obsessive plot to 
murder of his wife to save his 
money and land. He even convinces 
his 15-year-old son, Henry (Dylan 
Schmid, “Once Upon a Time”) 
to co-conspire with him. The 
plotting is coupled with the film’s 
initial slow, ominous pace, as the 
maniacal father son duo walk 
through towering green cornfields 
where the husks mask their faces 
in an oddly ethereal fashion. 
Director and screenwriter, Zak 
Hilditch (“These Final Hours”) 
uses very few artificial lighting 
techniques and employs the use 
of available lighting, which in 
1922, truly only came in the form 
of daylight, burning lamps and 
candles. When Wilfred and Henry 
hover over warmly-lit lamps on 
their dark porch in the middle of 
Idaho, the eeriness and tension is 

heightened because the viewer can 
only see within the parameters of 
what is lit in the dim lights. This 
leaves the viewer left to wonder 
what extends into the darkness. 
Overall, the direction was not 
the film’s issue, and it was even at 
times artful, where Hilditch plays 
with blurring and focus of natural 
elements on the ranch to tightly 
control the masking of characters 
from camera.

Like the title of the film, the year 

is 1922 in Des Moine, where women 
were recently granted universal 
suffrage. But in this rural setting, 
ranchers’ wives were expected 
to keep a tidy home for their 

husbands, with no room for greater 
personal aspirations, a societal 
hierarchy which Wilfred James 
supports. When his wife, Arlette 
(Molly Parker, “Deadwood”), a 
gifted seamstress before she was 
murdered, began talking dreams 
of selling their land and moving to 
the city to open up a dress shop, 
Wilfrid began to get nervous. For 
Wilfred, and like other men at this 
period, this threatened his role as 
the family’s decision maker, his 
land and his masculinity. Wilfred, 
with the assistance of his only son, 
Henry, brutally murder Arlette 
and throw her into the abyss of 
a dark well without thinking of 
consequences. Not shortly after, 
rats begin to eat at her body and 
emerge from her orifices, which 
ultimately serve as a metaphor 
for Wilfred’s festering paranoia of 

the rats bursting out of crevices, 
constantly reminding him of the 
great deed he did.

The murder occurs within 

30 minutes of the film, allowing 
for no true narrative build up. 
With the rising action of the film 
completed at the beginning, it 
leaves over an hour remaining of 
watching Wilfred increasingly rot 
from his turmoil and paranoia. 
This narrative pace and structure 
can be successful, but the slow-
burning, building mystery for 
which Hilditch presumably strived 
was sort of like extinguishing the 
candle altogether. The direction 
was dull at moments, but the true 
problem was rather more the story 
itself. The premise is not new, 
which isn’t to say that every film 
has to include a revolutionary plot 
or theme. But for such a common 
genre of small-town horror, it 
necessitates something unique that 
differentiates it from the rest, which 
this film lacks. There are plenty of 
acclaimed rural horror movies, 
and adding this to the collection 
doesn’t make a compelling push for 
it audiences to watch. It is barely 
terrifying or mysterious, and the 
only jarring element was how foul 
it was to witness rat infestations 
and see their revolting tails scurry 
across the screen about every ten 
minutes.

Lastly, Hilditch could’ve used 

this film as an opportunity to 
explore the larger picture of female 
liberation and breaking out of 
gender roles during this period, 
which would have added an extra 
narrative layer to augment its 
staleness. But sadly, “1922” goes 
into a large pile of attempts but fails 
at true, nail-biting, hair-on-the-
arm standing horror.

FILM REVIEW
TV REVIEW

SOPHIA WHITE

For the Daily

“1922”

Streaming on 

Netflix

Beautiful 
Trauma 

P!nk

RCA

ALBUM REVIEW

