Post: Our Paris
Our Paris
Ah Paris Hilton, we didn't really like your album, but we still find ourselves clicking on any headline featuring your name. Why? Here a writer from Pop+Politics speculates on why we love the diva-licious debutante -- and why we won't let her change.
A favorite of every pulp tabloid, insider blog and gossip show, Paris Hilton has achieved pop-cultural ubiquity. No mere celebrity, she has created a public persona outrageously exploitable in the marketplace -- a long-legged, cat-walking, air-kissing, drunk-driving designer advertisement. The "Paris" brand is used to hawk perfume, watches, even cheeseburgers. Soon the shelves of shopping malls across the country will be stocked with signature lines of lingerie, bathing suits, makeup, wigs, purses, shoes, a video game, and champagne in a can -- basically anything she can slap her name on.
It seems Paris can sell anything-- anything, that is, except herself as a singer. Music industry observers have gleefully labeled her debut effort, Paris, "a certified flop." First-week sales figures reached only 75,000, as compared to Christina Aguilera's sales of 320,000.
That Paris's celebrity comes not from any visible talent or ability -- other than her talent for being famous -- may account for some of the hostility directed toward the album. There seems to be more to it, though, and certainly more to the fact that even her fans have thus far rejected her redefinition as a pop star.
Paris public relations rep and legendary Hollywood flack Elliot Mintz once managed John Lennon. He can be seen these days following Paris from club to club, grinning crazily and generally trying not to look 30 years older than everyone around him. Far from seeing his work for Paris as a step down, Mintz views her as having the same generational appeal as did the former Beatle -- it’s only the times that have changed, he says. "Young people don’t believe in politicians," he told The New York Times. "They don’t believe in their leaders. They look to celebrities to represent them."
People love Paris. Teens around the world swoon for her sleepy-eyed debutante act. In their eyes, she can do no wrong, despite being the Pullman car of train wrecks. The calamitous events of her life -- recent DUI arrest, release of a raunchy sex tape, and a public spat with one-time chum Nicole Ritchie -- only make her more intriguing to her fans. She may be out of control, but that only heightens her legitimacy, making her seem less scripted or fake. Her fecklessness is charming. Her life may verge on chaos, yet she skates merrily by, still making the scene, still not wearing underwear. She remains aloof in the face of events that would ruin lives and careers for most people -- or, more to the point, keep them grounded and without MySpace for months. Paris embodies the life without consequences, a life all of us, on some level, wish we could lead.
The album, however, represents a departure from the brand Paris the performance artist she has cultivated during these years of party-going and vamping for the paparazzi. Clearly Paris wants to change her image. This would explain the presence of Mintz. Recent public appearances reveal a conscious desire to distance herself from the "air-head heiress" persona that has served her so well. Her declaration of abstinence from sex for a year is just one example. Paris recently told The New York Times that "the whole Paris thing" was "a game," and in Blender Magazine she proposed that she was "always playing a character." "I'm really serious as an artist," she told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times, "I'm a businesswoman."
Paris now seeks legitimacy by insisting on the unreality of her brand. As limiting a role as she may have devised for herself, it is what people now expect of her. Attempting to move away from it could prove disastrous. If her album is any indication of the way Paris will be received as a serious artist and businesswoman, she has seriously miscalculated.
Whatever the reason, Paris’s efforts to be "real" offend. The world doesn't want to hear Paris sing, regardless of how good or bad she might be at it. They don't care. As one reviewer put it, they want to see her get back to "the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses."
Why? Because they don’t want to be entertained as much as they want something they can believe in.
This entry originially appeared on Pop+Politics. Author Greg Magnuson also edits the blog BorderlandObserver and is currently working on his first novel, Hyperion Bridge, a mystery set in Los Angeles in the early 1950s.