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Paris!

A few interesting things you might not know about Paris Hilton:

1) On August 29, 2006 , the mayor of Las Vegas proclaimed the day, "Paris Hilton Day" and gave Hilton a key to the city.

2) Rumour has it that she’s been invited to play Mother Theresa in an Indian film: the director appears to have thought her suitable after she refused to take her clothes off for Playboy magazine.

3) Most surprising of all: Her debut album, Paris , which landed on my desk this month, is actually really good. Not in a post-modern, tongue-in-cheek, ‘ha-ha-ha-look-at-me-I’m-listening-to-Paris-Hilton’ ironic way. It’s not good in the same way that The Young And The Restless is good – i.e. being good through being obviously and irredeemably shit. It’s good because it’s great pop music. That’s the point about Paris Hilton. You can’t dislike her without disliking the whole idea of pop music.

I can hear the grumbling sounds already. The whole of Romania groans: “Paris Hilton? The uber-rich spoiled rich kid and heiress to the Hilton (as in Hilton Hotel) family fortune? The same Paris Hilton whose ex-boyfriend, the extremely punchable Rick Salomon, managed to make their home-made sex tapes one of the most best-selling porn films of all time? Oh dear, oh dear…

But hold on. It’s not quite like that. Paris is great because she’s smart enough to play dumb. Her whole appeal is based around pretending that she’s far more stupid than she is. This is something that comes across consistently in interviews – just how in control she is of her own image. During the hit TV show “The Simple Life”, basically an excuse for her to show how 1) rich and 2) out of touch she is with the real world she is, Paris once famously remarked of the downmarket supermarket Wall Mart, now the worlds largest corporation, “is that where they sell walls?” Funny stuff. Like the whole sex tape episode, it’s tempting to thing that from the start to the finish, she orchestrated everything, that everything was pre-arranged. She’s certainly inherited the business acumen of her Great-Grandpappy, the entrepreneur Conrad Hilton. She’s a model, actress, has her own chain of nightclubs, her own branded mobile phone, a range of perfumes, has written two books (really), and now added ‘singer’ to her CV.

And so to the album. It opens, rather predictably, with Hilton moaning in her best sex-kitten voice, over a bumping RnB, bass-heavy track with savage, almost Bollywood string stabs. It’s very much like a good Britney Spears track, albeit with more groaning – I know, I know, hard to imagine, but true.

With RnB and Hip Hop having entirely colonised the charts to the extent that it’s become synonymous with pop, the album has its fair share of well-oiled beats that Paris purrs over, like almost every other wannabe starlet in the music industry. However, many of the stand out songs point in different directions, with guitar-driven dance getting a look in with tracks like ‘Jealousy’ and the rather damn-fine ‘Nothing in the World’. None of them, however, rival the truly glorious ‘Stars Don’t Lie’, her first single and one of the best pop soundtracks to the summer. Despite sounding uncannily like the eternally unfashionable white reggae group UB40, and despite the fact that everybody else in the world is desperate to make dirty Dancehall of the Sean Paul variety, the song works.

Lots of singers and rappers have trademark yelps: Beanie man says “zag-a-zah”. Sean Paul says “Me dut-ty yeh”, or something equally incomprehensible. Paris Hilton? She says “Yah!” It’s the very same interjection popularised by Yuppies in the 80s, who would spend afternoons sat on the train, yelping the word into their rucksack-sized car-phones and while dreaming about making love to Margaret Thatcher. It’s a difficult feat, but she manages to say it in a way that makes her sounds utterly and exaggeratedly gullible, even on record.

The most hilarious inclusion on the album is her cover of Rod Stuart’s execrable hit ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy’. When Rod sings it, it’s like watching your Dad dancing at a wedding and trying to chat up the bride’s sister – extremely embarrassing. No, Rod, you’re not sexy. You’re actually rather disgusting. However, with Paris at the mic it becomes a great in-joke. Haha! Paris Hilton asking if she’s sexy! Funny!

You have to love Paris Hilton because she’s a mirror for our times. Unless you want to go and live in a cave and cry about how unfair the world is, you’ve got no other choice: welcome to the modern world. She’s shallow, transient, amazing fun and incredibly entertaining, capturing all the best – and worse – of pop culture. A friend of mine has the mad and rather fantastic idea of getting her to do a concert in MNAC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Palatul Poporului. If he manages, it’ll be one of the most incredible coup in the world of performance art, ever, because Paris Hilton says more about the times we’re living through that any amount of anally retentive high-art introspection ever could. In a fight between contemporary artist Gillian Wearing and Paris Hilton, I know who I’d be rooting for… Go Paris !