What it's like to watch P!nk fly over ACL Fest

If God had meant for pop stars to fly, they'd have wings. P!nk's always been a rebel, though.

So, there you are. It's Day 2 of Weekend 2 of Austin City Limits Music Festival. You're tired; your individual ligaments have taken an Ambien. You've inhaled Liquid Death and dust in equal quantities. It's the end of the night at the American Express stage, and you've camped out this long for one reason.

To see the lady from "Lady Marmalade" stage a one-woman production of "Wicked."

To see the only ACL Fest artist with a song on the "Kazaam" soundtrack punch gravity in the breadbasket.

To see Alecia Beth Moore, one of the best-selling female music artists of all time, tell God "So What," and give ACL Fest a moment it's never seen before.

(Except, y'know, last weekend.)

Ground control to Major P!nk: What it's like to see the stunt

I knew that P!nk was going to make like a grackle, so when she sang "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)," an obvious goodbye number, with some time left on the clock, it seemed obvious that takeoff was imminent.

Sure enough, she emerged after a brief break, dressed in a sparkling red leotard, to the opening thrum of "So What" (a song I long ago bought on iTunes, if you need to be assured of my good will). Her team strapped her into a harness — think of a highly technical playground swing. In a stroke of expert show choreography, P!nk shot into the sky with the lyric "I wanna start a fight!"

And listen, as cool as it was seeing Paul McCartney on this stage a few years back, Macca didn't perform aerial backward somersaults. As she sang the lyrics with full power, P!nk glided from side to side across the length of the stage, her harness cables connected to two towers on each end. This kind of stunt isn't exactly new, and a comparison to "Peter Pan" might be easy, but P!nk's elegant, athletic shapes swimming in the black space above our heads sure gave Neverland.

Every now and then, P!nk would touch down on a tall, narrow platform. And to crib a line about Ginger Rogers, P!nk did everything any other ACL headliner did, but airborne and in heels. On one landing, she did handstand pushups.

She came down to the line "You let me fall" — we all ate it up — before once again spitting on the very concept of floors and doing bicycle kicks in the air, twinkling like a sugar-coated cherry under the spotlight.

Oh yeah, there was music.

Here's the one downside to the Great ACL Levitation of 2022: It's so unquestionably exceptional that it makes everything that came before it, about an hour and 20 minutes of expert pop production, seem even more earthbound.

P!nk's vocal power and cultural impact are without question. She is a lion-throated standard bearer, a woman whose durability as an avatar for tough vulnerability has given a longevity that far outpaced her turn-of-the-millennium peers. (I mean, if you just look at "Lady Marmalade" alone ...)

And let us not forget the era-encapsulating power of early hits like set-opener "Get the Party Started" and "Just Like a Pill." My colleague, Austin360 culture reporter Kelsey Bradshaw, said she had never heard the latter; shocked, I asked if she had never been inside a JCPenney.

The tunes are an American omnipresence. When you put all those songs together, though, you find yourself at the intersection of talent and tackiness.

Nothing wrong with a little lowbrow, of course. But, to cite a few lines from "Raise Your Glass," a five-times-platinum chart-topper from 2010: "Party crasher/ Panty snatcher/ Call me up if you a gangsta/ Don't be fancy, just get dancy/ Why so serious?" Listen, "The Dark Knight" came out in 2008. You had to be there. Oh, and a line that haunts my waking hours: "We will never be never be, anything but loud/ And nitty gritty dirty little freaks."

From Weekend 1:Yes, P!nk flew through the air at ACL Fest — and so did Austin's hearts

Hey, I eat Velveeta and speak fondly of the golden era of VH1 "celebreality" shows, but if someone called me a "nitty gritty dirty little freak," there would be hands.

To watch a revue of P!nk's infinitely catchy, eye-squintingly written numbers is to know what it is like to make Easy Mac in a Le Creuset.

There's a long stretch of covers in the setlist, which, if I was a pop icon, you better believe I would charge top-dollar to workshop my karaoke roster on a stage sponsored by a credit card company. Yet: There's something symbolic to this prodigiously gifted artist telling the crowd that there are some songs she wishes she had written, and then launching into a cover of Bishop Briggs' "River," a tune that's soundtracked two episodes of "Love Island" and some bumpers for The CW.

More:I have seen Phoenix so many times. ACL Fest was one of the best.

But hey, we got a crowd-pleasing "Bohemian Rhapsody" and a lovely "Make You Feel My Love," too, so perhaps you've just gotta take your lumps sometimes.

Because luckily, daredevil stunts or not, it all comes back to talent with P!nk. At one point, the star stopped a song because of a sound problem. She's easy-breezy charismatic, obviously happy as a clam to be doing what she loves. To tread water while the issue got ironed out, she started singing a little a capella passage of "Please Don't Leave Me." And let me tell you: I'd trade all the wires in the world for a night of that sound taking wing through the ACL Fest air.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: What it was like to watch Pink fly over ACL Fest 2022