Right after the backlash against Jennifer Lopez that began in early summer—amid news that she was canceling her tour (she said for “family reasons,” everyone else said “low ticket sales”) —Galore posted a series of photos that tried to connect Charli XCX’s Brat to J. Lo’s music and videos of the past. The reaction to a question like, “Is Brat Actually J. Lo Coded?” was met, rightly so, with comments like, “How much she paid y’all to post this?,” “No. Next question,” “She wishes,” “How dare you do this to Charli,” “Stop trying to make J. Lo happen,” “This has to be rage bait” and “April Fool’s was two months ago.”
While that “comparison” was more than a bit of a reach, the connection Hilton has to Lopez in her latest video, “I’m Free” is hard to deny. Mainly because those green lasers are a staple of the “Waiting For Tonight” video. And everyone still knows it. While Lopez herself might have lifted them from the clubs they were popular in at the time, this is the image—apart from her plunging Versace dress—that she is arguably most remembered for. What Madonna did for vogueing, J. Lo did for green laser lights, bringing them to the forefront of mainstream consciousness as never before.
More obviously, Hilton is doing her “take” on Ultra Naté’s 1997 club banger, “Free,” a track she’s long been known to play in her go-to DJing rotation. And yes, it’s bittersweetly ironic that the song was released just a few months before she would be sent away by her parents to Provo Canyon School, that oppressive institution where she was force-fed dubious “medication” and abused in ways both physical and emotional. Fortunately though, Hilton claims she didn’t actually hear the song for the first time until she was back in New York, commenting in her “I’m Free” “press release,” “I heard it for the first time at a club in New York City shortly after being released from the Provo Canyon School where I experienced mental and physical abuse. For me, the song represents the journey of healing and finding your voice. It has served as an anthem of hope and a guiding light and I’m honored to have had the chance to create this new version.” Well, it doesn’t sound all that new, and, obviously, it doesn’t even begin to hold a candle to Ultra Naté’s original. Which also has an accompanying video that likely hits too close to home for Hilton’s experience at Provo Canyon when Ultra Naté’s appears in a skin-tight metallic gown that’s also fashioned as a straitjacket (“back then,” one could make such “ableist” commentary without risk of being lambasted).
While “Free” burned up the dance charts, Hilton, alas, was stuck in “hell camp” from the summer of ’97 to January of ’99, let out a month before her eighteenth birthday. As Hilton tells it, “The only thing that saved my sanity was thinking about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to become when I got out of there. I was gonna do everything in my power to be so successful that my parents could never control me again… I just wanted to be independent.”
So yes, obviously, “Free” would have some special significance to her as an anthem. Even though, if one is being honest, it was never much of an “uncertainty” that Hilton would be successful and independent. For, even if she says she didn’t use the financial resources at hand after turning eighteen, she still had the name and the according “it” girl status to “make something happen” for herself. Which she did once she was “released.” The same year that “Waiting For Tonight” would come out, specifically on September 7th, nine months after Hilton had been given the chance to reinvent herself as New York’s premier party girl. A rebirth, as it were (even though she was already a party girl before she was sent away—hell, that’s why she was sent away). Not so coincidentally, nine months is how long it takes to give birth. And in place of the “old” “caterpillar in the chrysalis” Paris was the “butterfly” one being photographed by David LaChapelle for Vanity Fair. It was that 2000 photoshoot that launched her image for the twenty-first century. A “rich bitch” flipping off the camera in her grandma’s mansion while simultaneously insisting, “People think I’m just this party girl. Well, I’m not like that.”
In the article that accompanied it, it would become retroactively unflattering (even more so, that is) to note that, “[Conrad Hilton was] a Trumpian figure, he palled around with celebrities…and went dancing with assorted L.A. showgirls.” Fittingly, Paris had signed with Trump’s (ugh) modeling agency the same year this article came out. A modeling agency that managed to stay afloat all the way until 2017, when it was closed solely because Trump had become “president.” And yes, it’s no secret that the Hiltons were longtime family friends of the Trumps, though it’s a piece of information that Paris’ “rebrand” has helped to mitigate. Even though, as recently as 2017, she was saying shit like, “I think that [Trump’s #MeToo accusers] are just trying to get attention and get fame. I feel like, a lot of people, when something happens all these opportunists will come out. They want to get money or get paid to not say anything or get a settlement when nothing really happened. So I don’t believe any of that. And I’m sure that they were trying to be with him too. Because a lot of women, I’ve seen, like him because he’s wealthy and he’s charming and good-looking so I feel like a lot of these girls just made the story up. I didn’t really pay attention to it. I heard a couple things about it. I don’t believe it.”
Just as she doesn’t want people to believe what they’ve seen of her own Trumpian behavior in the past (i.e., the free-wheeling racism and homophobia she would later attribute to being “traumatized”). What’s more, both the Hilton and Trump families are, as Nancy Jo Sayles put it in the aforementioned “Hip-Hop Debs” article, “forever plagued by a crisp taint of new money.” They might be “free” to do what they like, but it doesn’t mean what they do is “classy.” Luckily (in some ways) for Paris, Kim Kardashian came along to epitomize “new money” in an even worse way. Yet because Kardashian became the new “queen bee,” Hilton would end up copping some of her style too in order to remain relevant(ish). It is, indeed, Kardashian’s long hair extensions look that Paris emulates in the “I’m Free” video, using the retro gimmick of a wind machine (a.k.a. industrial fan) to make her hair billow as she basks in the glow of those green laser lights. The ones Lopez approved for her Francis Lawrence-directed masterpiece (on a side note: Lawrence would also go on to direct such Britney Spears masterpieces as “I’m A Slave 4 U” and “Circus”).
And yes, “Waiting For Tonight” has the same house-influenced sound that Hilton is grafting for the present as a result of having no original ideas of her own. Though she has the gall to deliver the outro, “I am the blueprint/The real OG/This is my legacy.” One, evidently, that looks a lot like Lopez’s. Hence, not only is the song not written by Paris (in part because it’s a remake)—with credits going to Rina Sawayama, Naliya, John-Adam Howard, Pierre Blondo, Ultra Naté, Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone—but its visual concept is also lacking in much substance. At least in “Waiting For Tonight,” there was more to it than just green lasers, with a narrative centered around a “Millennium Party” (or, what one might have then preferred to call an “End of the World Party”) on New Year’s Eve. One that takes place in an underground jungle club that looks like somewhere Hilton might have attended in her aughts glory days. To honor that “Y2K” concept, there’s even a “gasp!” moment when the computerized counter for the new year briefly seems to glitch and cause a power outage. But, of course, it’s just a false alarm and everyone quickly gets back to partying even harder (though, sadly, no longer partying like it’s 1999).
In another moment, Hilton also channels Lopez in “Waiting For Tonight” (as well as some brief glimpses of certain scenes in Lopez’s video for “Play”) by bedecking her entire body in glitter. The same goes for Lopez in a similar “nude” scene (though of course, unlike Paris, she’s actually wearing a top). Except that Paris uses this moment as yet another in the pile of meaningless scenes she’s showing us for this “video,” which is conceptless (a common trend at present) apart from her languidly bopping around and engaging in some non-choreo. But, like she says, she’s “free to do what she wants to do.” As if that were ever really something that was in question apart from a brief blip that ended in 1999. The year J. Lo would rise to prominence as much as Hilton, with the former releasing her debut album, On the 6. Funnily enough, Hilton would make her DJ debut at 2012’s Pop Music Festival in São Paulo, with J. Lo headlining the concert. It seems, then, that Hilton culling her inspiration from someone almost as subpar and lacking in original ideas is not as much of a reach as calling Brat “J. Lo coded.”
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