How To Eat Paris Hilton

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How To Eat Paris Hilton
Succumb, minions, to the horror of the socialite's new video. Also: Xtina Aguilera scoffs
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
You can be innocently sitting there. You can be minding your own business cruising your favorite blogs and your favorite porn sites and reading your favorite newspapers and thinking all is well and good with the world -- relative, of course, to its overall hellbound handbasket plummet -- when wham, your brain recoils and your eyeballs roll back in your skull and you feel as though your colon had been stabbed by a large rusty aircraft fuselage.
It is not as pleasant as it sounds.
This is what has happened: While scanning some music blog, you, being the pop-culture media slut you very much are, notice that Paris Hilton has recorded a new song. And has made an accompanying video, one which is, apparently, very different from her previous video. You cannot help but be full of horrified curiosity, for which you vow to medicate yourself shortly.
Then you notice the link. Every pore and cell and every synapse of your being says, Oh my God no, don't do it, run away now please please please stop. This is, of course, futile. As with any good car accident or hunk of mangled roadkill or internationally humiliating Bushism, you just have to look.
Four minutes of your life begin to drain away like precious life-giving blood. You feel a mite weaker, less human, like some giant alien insect is suctioning your anima into a giant proboscis.
The song, if you must know, is called "Stars Are Blind," and it has an awkward reggae beat that doesn't really fit the meager vocal, which is light and meaningless and, given all the heavy production and complete lack of distinct delivery, could be sung by anyone, but mostly sounds like a 14-year-old cheerleader singing to her cat.
The video, if you must know, is four minutes of Paris Hilton writhing around, mostly on a beach, mostly in black and white, mostly in a bikini, mostly with some unidentified male model who might actually be human but might as well be animatronic. The whole thing looks like a bad Calvin Klein Eternity commercial circa 1992, except without the style. Or the tolerable smell. Or the blessed brevity.
By the way, you may or may not wish to file the following painful tidbit into your exhausted brain: Paris Hilton cannot dance. Not even a little bit. Her hips seem to openly loathe the concept of rhythm and sway. Oh that poor tree she was grinding against. No wonder they shot the vast majority of the video from the waist up. I mean, oh my God.
The video ends. You groan. Your skin feels funny, slightly sticky, like you've been dipped in asparagus sweat. You think you might have gone temporarily blind, even as you wonder how many pitch-shifting gizmos and voice-thickening effects were added to that thin little voice to get it on key and in tune. Funny what 5 million bucks will buy you, you think.
Then you remember. You recall that modestly revelatory pop-culture moment not long ago when you were watching the "MTV Movie Awards" and sighing your way through the pomp and the ego preening, waiting patiently for AFI to come on to perform its very good new song from its very mediocre new album, when they dimmed the lights and announced a performance by none other than pop's hugely talented but wildly annoying diva wannabe, Christina Aguilera.
You automatically reach for the remote. You are about to hit mute for the five-hundredth time and go refill your scotch when the first notes of the song crank up, and it's all jazzy sexy live horns and a funky buildup and much writhing around of some admittedly very hot dancers and you think, hmm.
You have never, not even once, liked Christina Aguilera. She has the typically lethal entertainment-biz combo of a massive, barely educated ego coupled with a truly impressive voice, choosing to flaunt the former and completely abuse the latter by employing it like a frantic yo-yo, like a bird stuck in a light socket, straight from the Mariah Carey dog-whistle-on-meth school of insufferable vocal delivery, and it makes you wish, once again, that one of these hollow divas would once, just once, lend her voice to a song or style full of actual substance, wordplay, deep delivery. It is, you realize, a futile hope.
But then something happens. You notice that this new Xtina tune, "Ain't No Other Man," it has an amazing production and beat (you later discover that this is because DJ Premier is behind much of Xtina's new sound). Then the voice enters, and it is pure and unaffected and shines like a laser. Hmm.
What's more, there appear to be minimal vocal leaps and zero pitch-shifting/thickening effects and the video is sexy oozingly talented fun and there's a wicked-cool jazzy chorus that's one part Gwen Stefani and one part "Funky Divas"-era En Vogue, which causes you to recall your personal weakness for perhaps the greatest R&B/rock video hybrid ever, "Free Your Mind," and you vow to go hunt it down and watch it again on YouTube.
You then do something you have never done before in your life. You proceed to download a Christina Aguilera song. Intentionally. And you listen to it. Loudly. More than once. You find, much to your horror/embarrassment/guilty pleasure, that you enjoy it greatly, even more than you enjoyed your last guilty pleasure (Kylie Mynogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head," if you must know). You glance back in pain at your four minutes of pure hell with Paris Hilton, and you cannot help but compare.
You think: It is a pink Chihuahua versus a poodle with fangs. It is a stale marshmallow peep versus rum-filled vanilla cake. Isn't it all just fascinating, in an entirely shallow and meaningless sort of way?
Now you understand: Within various realms of torture, there are always degrees. Within categories and anterooms of hell there are always gradations and rings and subsets. It is like entering a store where all they carry is icing. After a while, you start noticing the subtleties. You start observing textures and nuances of flavor and squeezability versus viscosity quotients and you start thinking, Hey you know what? Icing isn't always so bad. In fact, icing might just be where it's at. It's a whole world unto itself. Plus it tastes sort of OK. Until it kills you.
But you realize, just before you come to your senses and snap the hell out of it and get back to the scotch and the AFI and the porn and something resembling sanity, that sometimes it's OK to grit your teeth and lighten the hell up and stop and smell the plastic roses. You know?

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Topic - How To Eat Paris Hilton - LWR 06:33:40 06/29/06 (1)

Re: How To Eat Paris Hilton - MMasztal 06:47:35 06/29/06 (0)

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