I’ll have you know that Paris Hilton is my friend on mySpace. The real Paris Hilton. I know this because several months ago I received a bulletin from her pointing me to a secret page with select tracks from her forthcoming album. They were awful. Embarrassing. Perfect. I sent the link along to some close friends, all of whom essentially called bullshit. “This can’t be for real,” they said. “It can’t actually be this bad.”
Paris’s eponymous album, released this week, contained all of those tracks and more. In spite of all the Scott Storch hype, the disc is childish and amateurish. It’s predictable, I suppose. The beats are danceable, and Hilton’s voice is an amalgam of that nasal, pimple-faced darling of your local community theater and Jenna Jameson masturbating. “Scott Storch,” she whispers not ten seconds into the first track, and your stomach buckles. It’s all going to be like this.
The first single from the disc, “Stars are Blind,” which you’ve all heard 8000 times by now, is a respectable showing. The album has one other bright spot, “Screwed.” Hilton battled Haylie Duff (of Hilary fame) for the rights to this song, but the real losers here are songwriters Kara DioGuardi and Greg Wells, whose catchy, true-love-means-you-can-put-it-in-my-ass number would have been sexy and fun in the hands of a Kelly Clarkson; on Hilton it just looks bitter and slutty.
Other can’t-miss tracks include “Jealousy,” an anti-Nicole Richie tirade (in which she implies implausibly that it was Nicole whose ego couldn’t handle Paris’s fame) and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” where Rod Stewart picks up a writing cred.
Hilton cowrote about half the songs on the album (the more difficult listens, not surprisingly), and one quickly gets the feeling she put more effort into the liner notes, in which she thanks each of her pets by name — names like Napoleon, Cinderella, Baby Luv, and Kim Kardashian.
Will this album get spun on the club scene? Yeah, probably. Paris is marketing the hell out of it. The beats are solid, the vocals are on-key, and alcohol and cocaine can be serious mitigating factors in that always-on-appeal case of The People vs. Bad Music. So roll up a dollar bill and get to it, because we’ll always have Paris.
Check out the album:
