The video, of course, celebrates everything that makes Paris Hilton Paris Hilton; it’s a post-Fifty Shades lite-scintillating lens into Paris’ well-documented love for herself (as well she should!), featuring a gaggle of Paris lookalikes crawling around in PG-13 bondage bras and butt-revealing underwear, definitely objectified for objectification’s purpose but also serving as a mirror for Paris Hilton’s self-perceived and projected infiniteness. “Get my attention, I’m ready to go/my only intention’s to give you a show,” she coos in her babyish tone, but as ever the subjective “you” in this scenario is Paris. Next to Paris Hilton, Kim K’s selfie affliction is monosyllabic and grossly incompetent. As most of us hopefully already know, Paris Hilton is so at peace with her image and its Platonic implications that she has incorporated it into her interior décor.
And yet, even though Paris Hilton is an executive-level pundit in the agenda of Paris Hilton as both a cultural entity and lucrative enterprise, there is also the consideration that she aspires to be a great musician or, barring that, a great artist. Though this aspiration has largely been viewed with mockery and disdain, it’s undeniable that she’s already successful, having bestowed us with a body of work that fulfills nearly every aspiration of 21st Century pop music, music so robotically precise and mathematically configured to appeal to all of our digital-radio-honed pleasure receptors it’s uncanny. When grizzled young rockist men on message boards complain about pop music being too “fake” in its algorithmic composition, crafted by 15 or 30 studio flacks and, perhaps, stand-in vocalists who are also computers (or: QT, whose music I like but the construction of which feels vaguely rockist to me), Paris Hilton’s music is the strawman they seek. But it transcends the strawman, because the music is so algorithmic, so hyperreal that it becomes a dimension unto itself, one that situates perfectly in the monetarily advantageous crevices of Las Vegas-humping EDM. It transcends largely because Paris Hilton is 100% aware of this (which is the best part); just take one look at the Lisa Frank Barbie car of a 2014 video for the truculent, pitch-shifted “Come Alive,” which features an actual unicorn and Hilton singing about “coming alive” in a song that intentionally makes her sound like a robot:
No but, I really do like it. Paris, her 2006 debut album, has no less than six bangers, with the remaining five songs pretty great themselves (from a songwriting standpoint!). The obvious standout is lead single “Stars Are Blind,” which hit Number 1 on the Billboard dance charts (2006 was weird; furthermore American EDM was invented in, like, 2012). On the song, Hilton sings with Marilyn Monroe-level breathiness about not settling, plus letting the one worthy guy know the reasons she is awesome, on a reggae song written by three guys well versed in pop reggaeton.Furthermore, Scott Storch, who produced three other jams on Paris, used his proximity to the burgeoning pop star to get a song on this album that only nominally featured the main artist. It worked both ways, of course: Hilton received the benefits of associating with two of the City’s most respected street rappers, and those dudes got the chance to drop bars about how excellent and real they are. There’s also a pretty great mid-career Dr. Luke production that vaguely presaged Hilton’s later excursion into dance music.
Her DJing is where I have to pull back a little bit more; it is god awful, from the played-out selections to the mixing skills —lthough, to be fair, the same could be said of a majority of highly paid, marquee name EDM DJs. (This interview, where she talks about not being as good at DJing as Avicii, is pretty funny.)
Still, I even find something likable, funny, and uncanny in the worst of her DJ sets. This clip, shot in August 2014, depicts her DJing in Saint Tropez—“one of my favorite places to come since I was a teenager”—a venue location so rich-person cliché it seems almost fictional. In it, she sprinkles her set with on-mic bon mots like “It is hot out here today,” and sips tipsily from a plastic chalice in a total visual summation of carefree whitegirlness.
And yet, in her perfectly Paris way, she makes it work. Her model smile never wavering, she sings along, but judging by reading lips she doesn’t really know the lyrics to the chorus as she arbitrarily adjusts random knobs on the mixer. By 1:20, though, she looks fully consumed by the vibes, literally in the throes of the thump, letting it envelop her body. Anyone who loves music, who loves dancing, can recognize that moment, and appreciate it, and appreciate that Paris Hilton, aspiring/aspirational pop star, knows not just to appreciate that moment too, but actually does.
I patiently await new singles from the queen of living-as-selfie, Paris Whitney Hilton.
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