Paris Hilton targeted in CD prank

[martin]

Obviously it's not that subversive - kidnapping Paris Hilton on one of her UK trips, decapitating her and then sending the police on a wild goose chase around Britain looking for her missing head - which could be dumped in a carboot, accompanied by a sticker with the slogan "Paris Match!" - would be more subversive.

 

[IdleRich]

"It would have been more interesting, and subversive/edgier/'guerilla' if he'd done this with someone people actually have a toss about - Johnny Cash, say, to pick name at random."

Couldn't you have tried guerilla-ier? Anyway, I'm not sure that it would have been, at least not to the majority of people, maybe it would have been to you. I think that he picked a victim who clearly and simply embodied the vacuousness of modern celebrity. To me she is ideal, he could have picked, as you say, Johnny Cash but to what end?

 

[mistersloane]

Obviously it's not that subversive - kidnapping Paris Hilton on one of her UK trips, decapitating her and then sending the police on a wild goose chase around Britain looking for her missing head - which could be dumped in a carboot, accompanied by a sticker with the slogan "Paris Match!" - would be more subversive.

On a celebrity kidnapping scale though nabbing Kraftwerk's robots and sending them back to them piece by piece until they paid up would be the nads.

 

[martin]

Ha ha, I'd love to see that

 

[Slothrop]

...you would never do anything (apart from sit around and be snide about how the things that everyone else was doing aren't subversive enough obviously)

That's my day in a nutshell! Do you know me or something?

I was about to say "Welcome to Dissensus"...

 

[DJ PIMP]

How long before someone starts selling bootleg copies of the altered cds on ebay?

Haha...

 

[mister matthew]

he should have done Bono. that would really have woken people up from their slumber

 

[marke]

naturally - the whole thing has been posted on youtube :

 

[Guybrush]

One of the tunes can be downloaded here:

That's Hot

 

[gek-opel]

The Bono thing is spot on- talk about an easy target with Hilton- everyone knows she's little more than an essentially uninteresting blank with a lot of dosh and media attention... (around whom some reasonably interesting though perhaps ultimately spurious crit-theroy arguments can be espoused... see Penman)I'm now imagining an anti-U2 culture-jamming type thing... basically Negativland with a bigger marketing budget...

 

[Tactics]

this entire thread

is proof that ppl in this forum will hate on anything man.......esp. things that were once deemed 'cool' or whatever and now supposedly are not

hipsters *shakes head in disgust*

 

[gek-opel]

Come on its not quite as simple as that... there's two elements to the critique. Firstly Paris Hilton is a weak target, and therefore this activity is in no way subversive, (added to this is the vague hint that in fact everyone benefits from this, ie- both Banksy and Hilton... as a form of protest its utterly toothless)
Secondly many other people (ie broadsheet media etc) will applaud this activity, and that runs counter to peoples popist-friendly attitudes (ie the idea that although her album isn't great, its no worse than a whole heap of pathetic pseudo-"credible" MOR Indie todge, but this gets pathetically singled out as it fails some moronic crypto-rockist authenticity test).

Its not that this kind of media-jamming is "out of date" or "so last year" its that its being practiced against a laughably easy target who perhaps doesn't deserve it...

 

[D84]

Furthermore, without this stunt the Hilton CD would have been utterly ignored by the world at large and sunk without a trace in the sea of insipid major label new releases.

Since when was Banksy cool? And what does it matter being "cool" anyway?

 

[UFO over easy]

Furthermore, without this stunt the Hilton CD would have been utterly ignored by the world at large and sunk without a trace in the sea of insipid major label new releases.

Bollocks, it just would've been ignored by trendy art school folk and people on forums like this.

 

[Norma Snockers]

Bollocks, it just would've been ignored by trendy art school folk and people on forums like this.

What would it have done then?

 

[swears]

And what does it matter being "cool" anyway?

I dunno, ask Ferris Bueller.

 

[qwerty south]

a stunt like this must add to the kitsch value of the paris hilton cd.

it's 'adding value'!

 

[don_quixote]

love popjustice.co.uk's trashing of this stunt!

 

[don_quixote]

£500 on ebay what

 

[tate]

Hilton- everyone knows she's little more than an essentially uninteresting blank with a lot of dosh and media attention... (around whom some reasonably interesting though perhaps ultimately spurious crit-theroy arguments can be espoused... see Penman)

Thanks for bringing up Penman. His blogpost on P Hilton struck me as poor. I of course realize what he was going for, what he was attempting, but in the end I think that his energies were misplaced. Pointing out misogyny and the existence of a hypocritical media-ocracy, or a bureaucratic media class who depend on the likes of P Hilton for their existence, is indeed important and potentially very insightful (especially if done well), but his response was little more than a personal counter-fantasy about what she is "really like," how "she really knows herself" - which was little more than the mirror image of the position he was criticizing in the first place. On an anecdotal note, I would add: if you have been as inundated with her for the past however many years as we stateside have been inundated, it becomes very difficult to abide the kind of recuperative reading that he suggests. I mean, can you imagine a north american critic trying to tell the UK that Pete Doherty is actually just misunderstood and maligned by the media? That *I* have understood him better than you?

I'd also suggest that there was nothing particularly literary critical about that post, unless you include the old idea of "let's reverse a dominant cliche to see if we can read what's behind it in an interesting way." But that's not enough to constitute literary critical thinking, it's just a good first step. When the next step is replacement of actual analysis with personal projections about the inner lives of 'stars,' then something is amiss. All just imho.