Post by Admin on Jun 5, 2015 22:20:25 GMT
Mid-May, Cash Money Records recording artist and professional DJ Paris Hilton unleased the video for “High Off My Love,” a fairly pat electro banger splashed in rote, festival-friendly white-noise wash and the requisite trap interlude featuring label boss Birdman. It’s so dumb. I love it!
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: