It was only a matter of time before Paris Hilton did what so many other celebrities have done before her, and tried her hand at DJing. The 31-year-old heiress, whose career already has enough diamante strings to resemble a particularly funky sitar, launched her DJ career at the Pop Music Festival in São Paulo, Brazil. Yes, she literally launched herself, standing alone on the stage with only a giant LCD screen of her face benignly winking at the crowd, who remained largely static as she mashed her way through her own song and several standard party bangers.
Although DJing is a bit of a specialist subject, it's not particularly difficult. It's not like being a vet and learning how to spay a hamster. It doesn't take seven years to learn where the bit in I Wanna Dance With Somebody skips because you downloaded it illegally, or when to fade out My Sharona because it's just gone on just that bit too long and everyone's about to leave the dance floor to go for a fag. At their most boiled down, DJing instructions could fit on the back of a cocktail napkin. So here goes:
In front of you are two CD players and a mixer, which is much like your average stereo, only with a conjoined twin. 1. Put first CD in right-hand CD player and press play. 2. Put a CD in the left-hand CD player. 3. When the first song is about to finish (the CD player will let you know by flashing numbers and lights at you), press play on the left-hand CD player. 4. Repeat from the top until you either fall asleep on the desk and start playing Single Ladies on a loop or get too drunk to remember what you've just played and start playing Single Ladies on a loop.
But it's not like Hilton really needs to know all of this, or indeed any of it. She could have simply plugged in a pre-loaded iPod and done one. And the worst part of the video isn't when she starts to sing over her own song – which is, incidentally, playing at the wrong volume – or when a random man appears to crank it up as the track blunders into Rihanna's We Found Love. No. The real toe-curler is how absolutely alone she is on that stage, in front of those people who are expecting to be entertained by her and the best she can do is point a finger into the air, like a witch at a rave, and fiddle with the effects button on the mixer, which my trained ear tells me is set to "flange".
There's nowhere to hide when you are a DJ. You are alone, very alone. It's like singing in front of the mirror, but in front of a room full of people who want it to be the best night they've ever had. It's an X Factor audition to a paying, slightly off-their-tits crowd of Simon Cowells. If you play dance music, you can easily busy yourself by picking which obscure remix you're going to put on next, and then spend two minutes mixing it in, while also really getting into the music by shoulder dancing and still maintaining an air of effortless cool. If you decide that you want to play nothing but riot grrrl punk, however, there is a lot more standing around and twiddling of hair between songs. As I learned from bitter experience. Poor Hilton knows nothing of this. What she needs on that stage is moral support. Someone to at least dance with a bit – perhaps even a hologram of herself beamed onto the stage. She needs a hype man, someone like Flavor Flav, but wearing Cavalli and next season's heel. She needs her cousin waving a hanky at the crowd like Erol Alkan had at Trash. She just needs some company; a cavernous Starbucks cup or a tiny, dirty-bottomed handbag dog. Anything.
Of course, she's not the first already-famous person to play two songs next to each other at a party, and of course, when an invite flutters through the letterbox with "B-LIST FAMOUS PERSON DJING AT THIS PARTY!!" embossed in the corner the immediate reaction isn't, "Ooh, we're going to have a banging night necking cocktails and vol-au-vents, bet they'll play some serious tuneage." Because celebrity DJs AREN'T PROPER DJs. No one goes to a party to dance to the music that bird from TOWIE is going to play – they go because that bird from TOWIE is going to be there and you can get a proper, close-up look at her nose job/gravy legs. But at least she might take it seriously. With a mere two hours' practice, Hilton would have looked like she knew what she was doing in Brazil. She could have hired a club, invited all the girls, plied them with champagne and practised until she really nailed that Gotye mix. Truly, she didn't have to stoop so low.
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