Pink Explains Inspiration Behind Moving, Viral VMAs Speech on ‘Ellen’
What inspired Pink to use her Video Vanguard acceptance speech at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards to share a moving story about her daughter? She explained how the viral, moving oration came to be in a new interview with The Ellen Degeneres Show.
Pink reduced audiences to tears at the VMAs when she recalled how her daughter, Willow, said she felt ugly for looking "like a boy" after a classmate's teasing. Pink proceeded to assure Willow that some of rock's and pop's greatest icons were androgynous, and the resultant speech caught on like wildfire.
Still, Pink insisted to Ellen that she didn't expect the outpouring of support, and joked that Willow wasn't fond of it.
"My daughter was incredibly unimpressed," she said, before remembering feeling upended by Willow's words. "I was so speechless and I didn't want to mom her and start preaching to her and not be effective at all, so I just stayed quiet."
"And I said, 'Why do you think that? Did someone say that to you? What's happening?' And she's like, 'I just look like a boy with long hair,'" she continued. "I just didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. And I went home, I cried, and I made this Word document."
And that Word documented amounted to one of the most memorable VMAs moments in awhile, in which Pink urged her daughter — and anyone else — to trust in the inimitable and unique.
“So, baby girl, we don’t change,” Pink shared. “We take the gravel and the shell and we make a pearl. We help other people to change so that they can see more kinds of beauty.”
Pink Suits Up for the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards: