Paris

by

Paris Hilton

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Something interesting I've been noticing is that many people (some of my friends included) are saying that they are surprised by how much they like Paris Hilton's new single. You shouldn't be. Someone with her infinite wealth can easily afford to hire the right team to make her album as addictive as possible. This is the same tactic that allowed Britney Spears to achieve huge success so quickly. She had powerhouse producers behind her to make her music extremely infectious, causing just about anybody who didn't know any better to think to themself, "Wow! This girl's a great artist!" No. There's a difference between being a great artist and someone with the right team of producers working on their side.

This music is addictive because of its simplicity. Simple tunes are easier to hum/sing/remember, which is very appealing to some people. They contain "safe" harmonic and melodic structures where scale degrees and chords proceed to predictable locations, which are very immediately pleasing to the ear, yet not very rewarding (especially in the long-run). Paris' music is just that: predictable melodic/hamonic structure, geared toward making people think that she is actually a surprisingly valid artist, when she's actually deceiving them so that she can gain even more fame and fortune. How predictable...like her music.

On top of it all, there's a magical device that the music industry has tried to keep hush-hush over the years, but is now becoming common knowledge to the public. Referred to by producing veteran, DJ Premiere, in the video that accomopanies Christina Aguilera's new Back to Basics album as "auto-tune", this aweful technology allows producers to adjust the pitch of someone's voice after it's been recorded. Wonderful. At least before, people with minimal talent had to re-record over and over until they got it right, hopefully learning a little bit about relative pitch in the process and forcing them to slowly learn how to sing in the process. Obviously, Paris has used this. Her "interpretation" of the melody in this song is so terrible that she obviously has had little or no vocal training, and thus, has no more of a concept of relative pitch than anybody else in the country.

Paris said in an on-set interview for her video that she does not want people to think that she is just making an album just to do it, but that she has dreamed of making one since she was very young. Well guess what, Paris? Just because you want to make an album doesn't mean you should. Leave that to the dedicated, intelligent musicians of substance like Sheryl Crow, U2, Alicia Keys, and OutKast. Go take some music theory courses and intensive voice lessons and study some of the music that came out before you were born. Read some good literature. Exercise your mind. Then maybe, even you can release a respectable album.