Heidi Montag's 'Fashion': Actual song or great cosmic joke?
Jun 24, 2008, 01:09 PM | by Adam Markovitz
Categories: 'The Hills', Music, Ouch! That was my ear!, Reality TV
The news of a fresh Heidi Montag single is the kind of brilliant pop culture non-event that we here at EW.com pray for with every breath. So imagine our squealing delight yesterday when we discovered that the ever-giving Ms. Montag had graced us (or more specifically, Us Magazine), with a new trashpop masterwork destined for internet infamy. "Fashion," a synth-stuffed ode to all things wearable, is Montag's third official single (after the bland "Higher" and the teary "No More"), but it's the first one that actually captures some of the vacuous giddiness that has made Heidi the most fascinating — and infuriating — of all the Hills gals. (We've embedded the track after the jump, but a warning to your ears and your soul: the song plays automatically as soon as the player loads.)
Musically, the song's beat is generic canned club-thump with a dash of the dollar-store production values usually reserved for Bratz commercials, but the lyrics are nothing short of mind-blowing (or mind-numbing, depending on your taste). Montag has always been surprisingly eloquent onscreen — even if she spends most of her breath on crazy victim-speak monologues about loving Spencer, needing space from Spencer, or loving and needing space from Spencer — but you'd never know it from the lines in this song, which include grammar-busting gems like: "I am, I'm too fabulous; I'm so fierce that it's so nuts." And once she's beaten the English language into an unrecognizable pulp, Heidi starts in on French, chanting designer names in a baby voice with an Inspector Clouseau accent. But hands down, the best part of the song comes early on at the eight-second mark when Montag, overcome with a pure jolt of self-love, simply shrieks her own name like a celebutante battle-cry, or a one-girl roll call for her own troop of self-tanned Mouseketeers. Am I the only one who thinks she might be better off ditching lyrics entirely and simply singing her own name over and over again to the melody?
You could throw pot shots at Montag till the cows come home, but really, no one could possibly skewer the woman better than she does herself with proclamations like, "I live to be model thin/ Dress me, I'm your mannequin." And while it would be fun to think that some of this is done with a wink, it seems unlikely that the girl we've watched morph from a fresh-faced Colorado kid to a surgically enhanced fame-seeking missile is actually in on the joke. She's her own number-one fan, which always makes her stabs at fame outside the reality TV world sad and funny in equal measure. And unfortunately, despite all its pumped-up production, the real beat underneath "Fashion" is the tick-tock of the 15-minute clock counting down Montag's tenure in pop culture.
Your turn, PopWatchers. Give the song a listen after the jump, and then decide: Is "Fashion" a faux-pas, or has Heidi finally found her style?
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