by The punks said that anyone can be a musician – but as proof that this is not true, play Kim Kardashian’s 2011 single Jam (Turn It Up), a pop-EDM track that is lethargic, alien and somehow too exciting at the same time.
You can’t blame Kardashian for trying her hand at pop music, of course. Music history is littered with models, socialites and tabloid personalities who thought they were recording permanent celebrity – or, indeed, genuinely thought they had musical talents worth sharing with the world. For every Karen Elson – who parlayed modeling into a successful career as an alt-country girl – there’s a Tyra Banks, whose six-year attempt to break into pop produced only one song, the woeful Shake Ya Body.
However, the model-turned-singer is the career pivot who refuses to die. This month sees the release of Paris Hilton’s second album, Infinite Icon – her follow-up to 2006’s ultimately re-evaluated Paris, which brought us cult single Stars Are Blind – as well as new album from Suki Waterhouse, whose music career has been so successful, with 500m streams and counting on Spotify alone, that many of her Gen Z fans probably don’t know about her past life as the face of Burberry.
“If you have a reputation like this, why not turn it into something that could make more money?” says Rich Juzwiak, a critic who has written extensively about Hilton’s extended business ventures. “For many people, it’s probably not that different from investing in real estate. You get a little bit more of a public ego boost, but I think it’s just a way to diversify your portfolio, based on the idea that this is going to be easy.”
Juzwiak says the only model-turned-musician who has “launched a viable pop career” is Samantha Fox, who scored a No 3 single with Touch Me (I Want Your Body) in 1986. and I think it’s because that she leaned so much into the thing,” he says of his often off-the-cuff appearances in the Sun. “She was a woman who was very public and she said: ‘OK, what if I did that sonically?’ And it totally worked.” Grace Jones succeeded even better in finding the music that suited her dramatic, even fearful appearance; her recording career has spanned from the late 70s to the present day.
As Juzwiak says, tailoring the music to your career narrative works better than picking an A-list producer and praying for chart impact. When US model, actress, tabloid figure, artist, podcaster, designer and author Julia Fox released her debut single, Down the Drain, this year, it felt more like a curio, born out of a sincere desire for something. creating something new, or a bid for pop stardom. With the song’s grim, kid-art aesthetic, Fox premiered the track at a hyped Boiler Room show in Brooklyn and reportedly blew out the speakers – a Bianca Jagger-at-Studio-54 moment for the Zoomer online terminal crowd.
For the most part, though, model-turned-musicians tend to aim for the top of the charts. But it doesn’t always go too well. In 1994, four years after appearing on Vogue’s iconic Supermodels cover, Naomi Campbell released Baby Woman, her first – and to date – last album. Hot producers including Gavin Friday, Tim Simenon and Youth, AKA Martin Glover, not to mention a video in which Campbell looks beautiful in the company of elephants, were not enough to save him from commercial oblivion – he failed to chart in the UK.
Glover says that success is not a guarantee when you’re making pop music, even if you’re one of the most famous people in the world: “It’s like when Mick Jagger makes a solo album and nobody buys it.” When working with Campbell on Baby Woman – a cover of Sunshine on a Rainy Day, which he wrote in 1990 with his wife, Zoe – Glover worked out of a five-room studio in Brixton and employed around 15 members. teams. “I’ve never seen the place more excited than when Naomi came in – the whole place was jumping. Someone with such a touch, they have a kind of magical air around them,” he says. But Campbell wasn’t the star of the day: “What left even Naomi’s charisma and swagger was her mother – she was almost more beautiful than Naomi, and delightful as well. It was a lot of fun.”
Contrary to the assumption many non-musicians might have, Glover says Campbell “could basically hold his own – this was in the days before AutoTune” – and was easy to work with. with him, despite his great reputation. “She was very easy to direct – I mean, she’s not Céline Dion, but still Brigitte Bardot” – who had hits in her native France with Serge Gainsbourg. “The song wasn’t ambitious enough to make it difficult and she sang it emotionally – that’s great.”
Not every musician who has been approached to work on a record with a model or socialite says the same thing. When reached for comments for this article, one songwriter who worked on Hilton’s first album said they would “decline politely. As our mothers always taught us, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
The Lemonheads’ Evan Dando, on the other hand, says he’s “spent 20 years doing coke and hanging out with models, so I know a lot about it”. A longtime friend of Kate Moss, he and producer Gibby Haynes enlisted the legendary model to sing for Dutch electronic duo Arling & Cameron’s Dirty Robot on their 2009 Lemonheads covers album. “Kate is smart, she’s like the girl next door: she’s beautiful, yes, but I think it’s really her brain that’s put her where she is,” says Dando.
He said that Moss would rather listen to music than make it, but was nevertheless involved in projects with bands such as Oasis, Primal Scream and Babyshambles, the solo project of her ex-boyfriend Pete Doherty. “She’d rather put her foot up and pretend it’s a guitar – she goes into fan mode,” says Dando. “If we were in Jamaica, she would be the one who would sit up all night, singing with me. She loved to sing [the Velvet Underground’s] Sweet Jane over and over, or making up new lyrics to My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. She can do it really well visually – once, a Natalie Imbruglia song came on and she went and dressed up and did her hair.”
Dando cites the fiery Lancastrian Elson as a prime example of a role model with a heartfelt artistic drive to make music. “Every pretty girl likes to take pictures of their feet – but that doesn’t mean they’re a photographer,” he says. “Those who don’t have the talent, they won’t stick with it, but the ones who really have the talent, they will.”
Commitment is what separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the transition to pop, says Juzwiak. He mentions Stars Are Blind Hilton – which was a hit, but not an inevitable smear when it was released: “That song is good, but I don’t think Paris Hilton is what makes that song good. She delivers it – she didn’t fuck it up. Although I could hear Gwen Stefani singing that song and owning it, because she has that pop thing that makes her so exciting.”
Obviously, there is a lot more to the camera than looking great on camera. “You either have it or you don’t,” Juzwiak concludes. “And you find out right after you go on stage whether you’ve got it or not.”
