What is the sound of one hand clapping?
What is the sound of tumbleweed wind whistling through the vacant expanse between two ears?
What is...oh, never mind.
Some might consider the first Paris Hilton album hard proof that armageddon is at hand, as indisputable an omen of end-times imminence as the excavation of mysterious papyrus codices from midlands bogwaters. Others of a less apocalyptic bent might merely think it a damning indictment of the cult of will-to-power and its attendant plague of craven ‘celebrities’ with nothing to declare other than their own eating disorders.
None of the above have been charged with the task of reviewing the record.
Still, let’s not get too huffy. Pop music isn’t built for posterity. Most times, the more disposable the better. Ms Hilton certainly fulfils that requirement in spades. And yet, if Paris is a dog, it’s a very well groomed one. The singer (cough) and her handlers have taken the precaution of swaddling her anaemic mewlings in nagging piano lines and top-of-the line beats. More to the point, this is an album Frankensteined together from bits of other records: ‘Turn It Up’ is a reprayed ‘Slave 4 U’; ‘Stars Are Blind’ is a tepid lover’s rock parody based on the what-if premise of Gwen Stefani doing ‘The Tide Is High’; ‘Heartbeat’ is Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’ in all but name; and ‘I Want You’ hitches, um, latter-day Plath style bleak introspection (“I’m the kind of girl who likes to tell you what she wants in life”) to the horns from the Grease theme.
Truth be told, Paris is not nearly as un-listenable as feared. Okay, it’s not good by any reasonable standards, but as the work of someone with no discernable personality, talent or point of view, it’s not the car crash it could’ve been. Seriously. Apart from the cover of Rod’s cheese symphony ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ that is.