No Talent? No Problem

She thinks it's hot: Paris Hilton brandishing her new album. Apparently, the record makes her weep with joy. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

For a 25-year-old, California heiress Paris Hilton has built up quite the resumé: accidentally starring in a hit sex video, feuding with Simple Life cohort Nicole Richie, nearly marrying a rich guy also named Paris and getting bitten by a kinkajou. A tabloid regular since she and her sister, Nicky, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2002, Hilton is principally famous for being famous. She has successfully launched an acting career, with appearances on The O.C. and in movies like House of Wax; since she tends to play vain, bitchy socialites, her competence as a thespian has been difficult to judge.

There’s been little said, however, about her ambitions as a pop star, even though it’s been three years since Hilton first announced she was working on an album. Reports on her musical activities with super-producer Scott Storch have been accompanied by the perennial question: “But can she sing?” Now that her debut, Paris — presumably a reference to herself, not her ex-fiancé — has finally hit record stores, the answer to that query is less relevant than a new question: “Does it really matter?”

Paris Hilton’s limitations as a vocalist are patently clear. Thin, breathy and meagre in strength and range, her voice on record bears the signs of electronic enhancement through tools like Auto Tune, an audio processor that corrects pitch problems. Hilton’s not particularly convincing when she’s speaking, either; in the song Jealousy, her flat intonation gives a reading-the-phone-book-like intensity to the line “Everything I did, I did because I cared, so how did all the good between us turn so bad?” In spots, her pitch is gratingly high; in Turn You On, her multi-tracked la-la-la’s sound like they were recorded at an eight-year-old’s slumber party.

That said, there are more exciting moments on Paris than anyone could’ve expected, proving that great pop music does not require a great voice. Slick, sultry and unabashedly shallow, Hilton’s club-ready dance tracks and catchy pop-rock tunes have zip, hooks, a few dollops of innuendo and even some flickers of self-mockery. It takes great chutzpah to include a song called Screwed — even more to willingly claim to be “the perfect girl for you to ruin.” Though the reggae-lite single Stars Are Blind exposed the shortcomings of her larynx, Hilton wisely stays in her safety zone on the better tracks, like the disco-country rave-up Not Leaving Without You, the oddly Cure-like Nothing in this World and the eerily faithful cover of Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?

Though Hilton gets co-writing status on five songs, credit for the album’s quality belongs principally to the hired help. She’s wise to begin her disc with a shout-out to Storch, the colourfully arrogant hitmaker (Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé) who handles six of the 11 tracks here and is often seen in Hilton’s company. Though Gawker memorably named him the Most Loathsome Man in Music, Storch maintains his reputation for lean, dramatic productions and will likely add a few more hits to his long list with this crop, especially Fightin’ Over Me, in which Hilton plays not-that-hard-to-get with guest rappers Fat Joe and Jadakiss.

Storch is not the only all-star present in the background. Enrique Iglesias’s main man, Fernando Garibay, helped craft Stars Are Blind; having already repurposed Soft Cell’s Tainted Love to chart-topping effect in Rihanna’s S.O.S., JR Rotem tries to do the same with the theme from Grease in Hilton’s I Want You. Meanwhile, the talent behind the song Screwed includes Green Day producer Rob Cavallo and Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter who has performed the same service for Hilton’s current nemesis, Lindsay Lohan. (So much for loyalty.)

The Paris Hilton of the '70s: Model-cum-disco queen Amanda Lear in a 2004 photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival. (Photo Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

Hilton is savvy: she surrounds herself with the right people and doesn’t let her ambitions exceed her reach. It’s a strategy that’s served many celebrities-cum-singers in the past. Disco, which Hilton evokes with I Want You and the Rod Stewart cover, had no shortage of distinctive divas — Donna Summer, Thelma Houston and Loleatta Holloway among them. But the era was also kind to soft-voiced part-timers like Charlie’s Angels star Cheryl Ladd, ambiguously gendered model Amanda Lear and others who were only required to coo sexily over throbbing grooves. (Ladd’s single Think It Over made it to No. 38 in Billboard’s chart in 1978; Lear was most successful in Europe and Asia.)

A Harvard dropout turned New York bon vivant and Village Voice theatre reviewer, Cristina Monet didn’t let a lack of vocal prowess stop her. Recording as Cristina in the early '80s, she made two albums of acerbically witty yet highly danceable music that included a hilarious update of Leiber and Stoller’s pop classic Is That All There Is? and the scene-skewering Disco Clone.

Disco also made a star out of Andrea True, with whom Hilton shares some striking similarities. Like Hilton, the singer of the 1976 smash More, More, More (credited to the Andrea True Connection) got a big career boost by starring in pornographic movies. The difference is that True’s dirty movies were filmed with her knowledge and without a night-vision lens. Just as Hilton played off her sex-tape infamy by singing about feeling “screwed,” True asked her listeners to “get the cameras rollin’.”

True also found collaborators who could work around her vocal liabilities. More, More, More was written and produced by Gregg Diamond, who worked on David Bowie’s Young Americans and helped make stars out of Luther Vandross and George McCrae; it was mixed by Tom Moulton, a crucial disco figure whose innovations include the extended 12-inch remix. Now retired from show business, True reportedly works in Florida as a counsellor in a drug and alcohol rehab centre. (It’s impossible to imagine a better subject for a biopic for Hilton to star in.)

If Hilton seems destined to share True’s status as a footnote in music history, the socialite’s purring and cooing retains great charm in the present, crowded as it is with TV talent-show contestants straining their throats to become the next Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey. As impressive as Christina Aguilera may be, the vocal calisthenics she performs on most of her songs are more exhausting than engaging. While her debut album reveals Hilton’s musical talent to be modest in scope, a little more modesty on her part couldn’t possibly hurt her or us.

Paris is in stores now.

Jason Anderson is a writer in Toronto.

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