So It’s Come to This.

Some random thoughts on Paris Hilton’s hittish single “Stars Are Blind”:

• It’s surprisingly non-shitty. In fact, it doesn’t even stretch the definition of “good” too hard. I don’t mean it’s a classic pop song or anything, but it’s pleasantly enjoyable, like a Bangles or a Monkees hit.

• One of the great advantages any fourth-generation Blondie wannabe has is the fact that Blondie was one of the greatest pop bands ever. (Fourth-generation exactly, by the way: second was Madonna, third was No Doubt/Gwen Stefani. All superior pop acts.)
  

• Perhaps most surprisingly, given the singer’s reputation, it’s one of the least-slutty of the Girls of Summer 2006 tracks. Nelly Furtado, Shakira, Fergie, and Beyoncé (each and every one more credible as artists and, more loosely, as feminists; okay, except Fergie) all have songs in the charts that are lewder and more provacative than the first single by a woman who first came to national attention on a no-budget sex tape. (This is all based strictly on the songs themselves, by the way, with no reference to videos or promotional material, which I haven’t seen. For all I know, she could be full-frontal nude in the video.)
  

• I can’t stop listening to it, along with Jessica Simpson’s “A Public Affair,” which is prime ’80s Madonna without the boring sexual politics. (Or a female Flock of Seagulls, if that’s an easier pill to swallow.) Makes me think of ABBA if they were produced by Trevor Horn, with some DFA percussion towards the end. Lovely.

• Obviously, anything good about the song is no credit to Ms. Hilton, but to the producers, songwriters, arrangers, musicians, and possibly ghost-singers she’s hired. I suppose she should be given credit for letting them do their thing and not inflicting her own (probably) miserable taste on the project. But regardless of who’s paying who, ultimately she’s more of a Veronica Bennett doing whatever Phil Spector tells her than a diva in the accepted sense. (Ronnie has a new album out, too, as it happens. Nothing on it is as good as“The Stars Are Blind,” but Ronnie is incomparably the greater artist. Natch.)
  

• Actually, a more apt comparison might be with Nancy Sinatra, a rich spoiled daddy’s girl who tried to be a pop star and succeeded on the strength of Lee Hazlewood’s writing, arrangements, and production.
  

• Finally, what the fuck. Paris Hilton already serves a function in our popular discourse: she’s the symbol par excellence of everything that’s wrong with American culture, from its vapid anti-intellectualism to its blind materialism to its easily-distracted nature to its fascination with false (and oddly sterile) representations of sexuality. She’s evil; that was the deal. If she’s involved in something good, then the world’s turned upside down. I’m reminded, inevitably perhaps, of G. K. Chesterton: how he would have relished this quasi-redemptive everything-you-know-is-wrong aspect of the matter. Ultimately, we’re forced to admit (ungraciously, like the older brother in the parable) that even Paris Hilton has a soul.