“Turn It Up” by Paris Hilton is a song I’ve been playing a lot this last week or so. It’s on the stereo now, actually. It has Paris telling us to turn the music – or the party, or the intensity, or something – up, but the song feels very hushed and intriguing to me. The bass is muffling the song, cocooning it, and Paris’ opening whispers and giggles feel like she’s beckoning us not to a party, but to a midnight feast or a game of let’s pretend. “I know! We can play pop stars!”*
The reasons I’ve been playing it so much though aren’t much to do with Paris – the sudden bunched-up string swoops Scott Storch uses to colour the track remind me absolutely and irresistibly of “Big Wings” by Bows, a fairly obscure indie-electronica act that may or may not be still going. The strings in “Big Wings” I’ve always taken to be the big wings themselves, beating somewhere far off in time and space as Bows’ singer dreams spooked dreams. It’s up there with Scott Walker’s “Boy Child” for tracks that unexpectedly evoke what I will flappingly call the cosmic. Without sounding like Hawkwind. Nothing else Bows did has the same effect, though “It’ll Be Half Time In England Soon” is a wonderful title.
So I’m already hearing Paris Hilton as some kind of sacral ambient music, and also by accident I put “Turn It Up” on a CD between two other drifting, half-awake songs: Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara” and Scritti Politti’s “The Boom Boom Bap”. The former is ecstatic, the latter reflective, but they’re both pretty blissful. “Turn It Up” bridges them shockingly well.
*(This is how her album uses Paris’ obviously very weak voice to its advantage – because it’s so puny and has so little reach it always makes her sound as if she’s whispering shyly into your ear, like the whole record’s a private game betwen you and her. It reminds me a bit of Sarah Cracknell in fact! The effect doesn’t quite come off on the faster tracks – I wish someone else, Hilary or Jessica or someone, had been given “Nothing In This World”, for instance. But I still like it.)