“It looked so cool on Amazon but now it just looks … so small.” Paris Hilton binges on props for her new DJ set, and it’s hard to look away.
There is literally too much to unpack here.
I’ve never fully understood the hostility toward Paris Hilton, whose DJ career is more the extension of a privileged elite running a brand empire than it is anything particularly to do with “DJ culture” elsewhere. She commands higher fees than many other people in the top tier, but then – she has a multibillion dollar fragrance business. After all that Page Six nonsense years ago in New York, it seems like she’s just morphed into a full-time business mogul. Booking her is more like booking Vidal Sassoon if somehow he was in a transporter accident with Barbie and their patterns got mixed. (Apologies – all metaphors during pandemic lockdown may soon somehow involve Star Trek. Be warned.) And now she does EDM.
But here she is, in her mansion. It’s all the paradoxes of the current situation in one. We’re all in this together – except some of us are worth billions, and face none of the problems that really make this pandemic so dangerous – heck, here’s one DJ who’s even working. We’re projecting joy and happiness, “literally” (imagine Paris’ voice saying literally with a vocal fry) with unicorns and rainbows and balloons. But even Paris is alone.
And for anyone who has trashed Paris Hilton or wondered what her actual life was like, here is some … remarkably realistic footage of her unpacking a bunch of Amazon boxes and forgetting what they even are.
I find myself fascinated by her channel in that – there doesn’t seem to be any layers to what she presents. It’s a knee-high golden plastic ferret statue, pugs in costumes. It’s like Martha Stewart on acid and a sugar high. It’s calibrated but… there doesn’t seem to be anything behind the curtain. It’s over nine minutes of just unpacking Amazon boxes.
I don’t know what Paris’ DJ set will be like. I’m not sure it matters. (She did train with the best – Mike Henderson, aka DJ Endo, gave her intensive lessons and actually speaks highly of her chops.)
Forget the DJ set, though. Maybe the best audiovisual set of 2002 is just looping Paris Hilton unpacking Amazon boxes of flimsy, tiny commodity Shenzen LED and “laser” toys and gnomes and metallic-chrome easter bunny and “what is this?”
Karl Lagerfeld “well, not him, but … an inspiration of him … as a pug … it’s pretty sweet” — on a, what is that, a fire extinguisher? A seltzer maker bottle? One made to look like a fire extinguisher?
To quote Paris Hilton in a (tone-deaf, given the preset moment) quote: I’m literally dying.
This can be the “looped yule log fire” of the pandemic – well, on top of that Apollo 13 dialog. (Combine them for some real art – endless Amazon mysteries and Apollo crisis.)
I can’t even find half of these things on Amazon, and I thought I did Amazon. Maybe Jeff Bezos keeps a special warehouse full of the weirdest stuff just for Paris. I feel like the ghost of Andy Warhol would watch this.
But if you’re wondering why the hell I’m on this tangent, I want to say to the DJ community:
Make something this surreal and accidentally relevant. At least if we have cameras pointed at us.