first round
(10) Cascada, “Everytime We Touch”
eclipsed
(7) Paris Hilton, “Stars Are Blind”
227-140
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/24.
Emilie Begin on paris hilton’s “Stars Are Blind” and other silly love songs
If you show me real love, baby, I’ll show you mine
In 1976 Paul McCartney asked us, “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs / and what's wrong with that?” McCartney wrote that song in response to his critics, particularly his former bandmate and songwriting partner John Lennon. Many had dismissed his post-Beatles efforts as saccharine, but McCartney would have the last laugh. The song would go on to hit #1, making it the 27th of his 32 American number-one singles as a songwriter. It’s a record he still holds to this day, surpassing Lennon and Max Martin who are both tied at 26.
30 years after Paul McCartney released “Silly Love Songs,” we were treated to another seemingly silly love song on the radio when Paris Hilton released “Stars Are Blind,” the lead single from her 2006 debut album Paris.
I was 18 years old at the time and had just graduated high school. I admittedly saw Paris Hilton the same way many people saw her: famous for being famous and not much else. Earlier that year for my 18th birthday, a family friend had gifted me a bottle of Paris Hilton’s perfume. I politely thanked her and immediately gave it to my little sister, ashamed of it being on my side of the bathroom vanity we shared.
A few months later, I began my freshman year of college at Mary Washington and moved into the all-female basement floor of Mason Hall, affectionately known as “The Tunnel.” My freshman year’s fall semester soundtrack mostly consisted of a few albums released that August–September 2006 timeframe. These were inescapable if you attended house parties in sketchy unfinished basements or the dorm room power hours that preceded them.
A Sampling of Albums Released During This Timeframe*:
August 2006
Danity Kane’s self-titled
Hellogoodbye’s Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!
Paris Hilton’s Paris
September 2006
Beyoncé’s B’Day
Fergie’s The Dutchess
Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds.
*Some honorable mentions here: Nelly Furtado’s Loose, released in June of that year, and Lily Allen’s Alright, Still and Gym Class Heroes’ As Cruel as School Children, both released in July.
Of that list, Paris’ album wasn’t heavily featured on my iTunes, or, let’s be honest, my LimeWire download queue. My dismissiveness around her music stemmed from the same insecurities and pressure many 18 year-olds feel around appearing to have taste, whatever that may look or sound like the year they turn 18.
Some people never get beyond their stupid pride
In 2006, pop music was still in the midst of yet another critical recession, with many people dismissing anything that they felt didn’t carry enough weight or substance. Out with the old pop stars, and in with the love for any four white guys from Brooklyn or London with messy haircuts, tight jeans, and a band name that followed the “The <insert one-syllable plural word here>” naming convention.
Basic. Cheugy. Cringe. When something has mass appeal and doesn’t carry some level of quality as determined by a certain set of tastemakers, purely enjoying that thing without a preface isn’t acceptable. In an effort to justify liking these songs, artists, and sometimes whole genres, we decided to just lump them into a “guilty pleasure” category.
Jennifer Szalai’s brilliant New Yorker article “Against ‘Guilty Pleasure’” describes how the concept of this term can be traced back hundreds of years ago. The first time “guilty pleasure” made an appearance in The New York Times was in reference to a brothel. Over the years, gluttony has remained the only sin really associated with guilty pleasures, and the overconsumption in question is around our choice in media. Indeed, the only crime committed here is that of having what some may consider bad or trashy taste.
A guilty pleasure can bring us joy but it must simultaneously be accompanied with an acknowledgement of shame. We do not proudly state our guilty pleasures, we admit them.
Why shouldn't we be with the one we really love?
It’s really thanks to one of my freshman year dorm suitemates that I finally grew to know and love Paris Hilton’s music, first as my own guilty pleasure, and later as a proud statement. My gateway Paris song was “Screwed.” My suitemate kept “Screwed” and the Format’s “Oceans” in heavy rotation that semester, two songs I love and will forever associate with being 18 and out of my parents’ house for the first time.
“Screwed” was initially going to be Paris Hilton’s lead single, but after an unauthorized song leak, changes in album direction, and a legal battle with Haylie Duff (sister of Hilary), who had also recorded a version of the song, it was demoted to just another track on the album. As Hilton’s direction shifted to being more R&B and hip-hop-focused, she chose the reggae-influenced “Stars Are Blind” as her lead single, a song co-written and co-produced by Fernando Garibay, who would go on to co-write and produce Lady Gaga’s Born this Way album.
Garibay had originally pitched it to Gwen Stefani, which makes a lot of sense if you play this song alongside “The Sweet Escape” or No Doubt’s “Underneath it All”. Stefani had to refuse the song at the time as she was taking a break to have a baby, and so the song went to Paris.
Coming in at under four minutes, it’s a piece of cotton candy that morphs into an earworm that will not surrender until you’ve hummed it at least a dozen times. I have synesthesia, and for me it comes in the form of seeing notes as colors. “Stars Are Blind” is in D major, and I’ve always seen D as pink for some reason, which means my neurodivergent mind aligns with Paris Hilton’s brand!
Unlike many of her contemporaries who released their albums three months after signing a recording contract, Paris actually took close to two years to record her album and worked with a who’s who of mid-2000s songwriters and producers, including Garibay, Scott Storch, Kara DioGuardi, Billy Steinberg, Greg Wells, and, unfortunately, Dr. Luke.
It makes sense that director Emerald Fennell, the queen of cinematic soundtrack juxtaposition, would choose “Stars Are Blind” to set the stage for one of the best scenes in Promising Young Woman. Here, we see Carey Mulligan’s Cassie and Bo Burnham’s Ryan have a sweet moment between aisles of snacks and over-the-counter remedies at the pharmacy.
For these two minutes, we forget that Cassie is avenging her best friend Nina’s rapist and believe Cassie could live happily ever after with a guy who can recite Paris Hilton lyrics at the drop of a hat. It’s only a few scenes later that our nice guy becomes a “nice guy,” and the illusion of Cassie’s silly love song is over.
Fennell explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview that she used the song because “It's one of my favorite songs. I needed a song for this movie that, if a boy that you liked knew every word to, you'd be incredibly impressed, and you'd know he had good taste.” Fennell wrote Hilton a letter to use the song in the scene, and when Hilton granted her permission, Fennell shared that it was because she understood the need for such a song to interrupt the film’s otherwise dark tone.
Though Promising Young Woman first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival nine months before Paris Hilton’s 2020 documentary This is Paris was released, the two were both filmed around the same time. One has to wonder if Hilton read Fennell’s letter as she began to share her own trauma on screen.
In her documentary, Hilton discloses she was sent to four “troubled teen” facilities as a teenager, enduring emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of those in charge. In many ways, Hilton’s rage and processing of what happened to her echo the themes Fennell’s film explores.
It’s the same rage that fuels the frustration of so many female pop artists who have been dismissed by critics for putting out music that dares to just be fun. After dealing with all sorts of abuse from so-called “educators” and later romantic partners who exploited her through the unauthorized release of a sex tape, maybe Paris Hilton’s way of working through that pain was through recording a song that had a happy ending.
Maybe I'm perfect for you
As I think back to people’s original dismissiveness around Paris Hilton’s music career, I can’t help but think about Matt LeMay’s harsh 0.0 Pitchfork review of Liz Phair’s 2003 self-titled pop album. He has since expressed remorse and regret over the review in a series of tweets from 2019, explaining he was 19 and calling the article “condescending and cringey.” In many ways, it feels vindicating to see the word “cringey” here describe the review that tore down a perfectly good pop album rather than the album itself.
Thankfully, we’ve had some much-needed discourse about how we choose to critique the media we like to enjoy just “because”. This also has been coupled with many media publications evolving to no longer just be a masthead of white men, resulting in a more appreciative lens for genres outside of what was traditionally appreciated by rock critics.
In many ways we all go through that change personally as we age and accept what tastes make us “us”. As I grew to choose a major, social activities, and friends in college, my independence also came with a new-found ability to unabashedly love what I love. For me, my silly love songs, if you will, come in the forms of my pre-1982 Steely Dan vinyl collection, Celine Dion and Olivia Rodrigo singalongs, and a healthy obsession with Yacht Rock and the cover bands that honor the genre.
As I go back to Paul McCartney’s big question from 1976, asking what’s wrong with silly love songs, I can only answer with one seemingly appropriate response: “that’s hot.”
Emilie Begin (pictured here in college, maybe listening to Paris Hilton) lives in Oakland, California, and is the co-host of the Old Millennials Podcast, which is best described as a "deep dive on shallow topics from the '90s and 2000s." She can usually be found dancing and singing along to mid-aughts chart toppers in between Zoom calls for her day job in marketing.
There Was Once a Time When You Believed That Everytime Would Last Forever: cameron carr On Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch”
When to Use Spaces in Two-Word Determiner Expressions
There are many instances in the English language where two words become joined together to create a compound meaning. Some of these combinations are so familiar or distinctive that they abandon the physical space between words and become one thing: a compound word. You may be especially familiar with a group of these words that refer to the quantity or existence of something.
Consider the following examples:
Everyday
Sometime
Anything
Nowhere
These words are all compound determiners. While it might at first seem easy to spot when to make compound words such as these, don’t be fooled. Not all common two-word determiner expressions can become compound words, and not everyone agrees on the rules.
Consider the following example:
“Everytime We Touch”
This example comes from the title of a 2005 song by the German dance trio Cascada. In addition to providing a sticky earworm, the song, via its title, implies two noteworthy perspectives on when and how compound determiners come into being:
Failure to maintain separation between words within a determiner expression conveys a disregard for particularized, definite meaning.
Compounding words can illustrate an expansive belief in continuous, generalized, and indefinite relational possibilities.
It may be helpful to first address the context of this example.
Context of Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch”
Suppose the year is 2005. Suppose you have just entered the sixth grade. Suppose you have just entered the public school system and discovered that the purpose of the mall is to acquire clothes that might be worn by those not required to don a white polo shirt and pair of navy-blue pants (full-length or cut just above the knee) five days a week. Without prior familiarity of this landscape—public school, middle school, pre-teendom—it is difficult to know the specifics of what others expect from you. Because you are new to the mall, or at least newly aware of all that the mall signifies and contains, you cannot distinguish one store from another. They vary in scent and color only.
In a situation such as this, determination is important. You might look around and observe that everyone is wearing clothing with a certain name and logo on it, the knees of all their jeans are torn in the same way, and one perfume of teenage musk reigns above the others. You might notice that this happens not just at the mall, not just at school, but everywhere. Anyone can recognize this: there are dominant clothes, and there are other clothes. Who wears the dominant clothes determines who will fit in, as adults like to say, and dominate within the pre-teenage social system.
As you come to understand the workings of this system, you begin to recognize things as closely linked together: the people who wear the clothes, the clothing brands. Should space remain between these two ideas or should they join as one?
Consider the following examples:
Delia’s
Hot Topic
Limited Too
Abercrombie & Fitch
Each of these stores, and every store in the Dayton Mall circa 2005, has a specific sensibility. But this will not last. Delia’s will go bankrupt. Hot Topic will add clothes in colors other than black. Even Abercrombie & Fitch, the strongest smelling store in all the mall (with perhaps the exception of Auntie Anne’s, but that is not a clothing store) will change: One day, Abercrombie will give its shirtless doormen shirts. Its shopping bags, with their eternally topless models—eternally without shirts on bodies and eternally without heads in frame—will retreat in favor of a plainer sort of icon, a logo: A&F.
The answer is no, these things should not join as one. The connections between brands and clothes and people wearing those clothes are specific but fleeting. Compound determination comes from connections distinct but lasting.
In what other ways might Abercrombie & Fitch form distinct connections?
The scent
The sound
The bag
We have already ruled out the bag, but its presence here notes that sometimes a compound meaning, despite not being commonly accepted as a compound word, is especially hard to shake off. Suppose you once had an Abercrombie & Fitch bag. Suppose that brand held, for you, such high association with dominant positions within a social system that you did not want to get rid of that bag. Suppose the bag remained at your bedside from approximately 2006-2009. That clean-chested hunky man (headlessly) watching you as you went to sleep. That man providing assurance of your purchased place within the social system. Doing this every night from 2006-2009 such that you come to see this figure as a comfort, a protector. Suppose this headless hunk were to sing you a lullaby. That lullaby would be “Everytime We Touch,” the same song playing with non-lullabic intensity in Abercrombie & Fitch, it seems, every time you enter. The bass pulsing from somewhere inside you, like that scent—Fierce, Abercrombie calls it—that either comes from every molecule of the store itself or from somewhere inside you as an autonomic response to being inside the store.
Let’s pause for a moment.
Did you notice the use of both everytime and every time near the end of the last paragraph? Look again. What are the differences between the usage of these words in the phrases “Everytime We Touch” and “every time you enter”? The latter refers to each individual time you enter, for example the first time you enter Abercrombie & Fitch and are overwhelmed by the swoopy-haired employees and fog of Fierce.
Could “Everytime We Touch” also refer to the individual times two people touch? It could, but it does not.
A Second, Abbreviated, and More Direct Context of Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch”
“Everytime We Touch” is not a song about an event. It is a song about feeling. Not even a feeling—just feeling. The song gives no specific details and makes no reference to any particular times we touch. “Everytime We Touch” is referring to a continuous and undefined experience. Cascada does not sing about each touch we have experienced. The song does not even attempt to define who “we” are. Everytime, in this instance, is something felt beyond an isolated experience. This is what dance music aspires to, or at least this is what listeners of dance music aspire to feel.
Suppose this is why “Everytime We Touch” is always playing when you enter Abercrombie. If Abercrombie sold an event—something singular and definite—you could purchase it and be done, but Abercrombie sells something else. Abercrombie sells a perfume that you don’t have to purchase but that follows you out of the store, anywhere you go, to your home, where it sneaks from a bag by your bed for months unbothered.
You don’t need to listen to the words of “Everytime We Touch” to understand: it’s the feeling itself you’re after, the feeling that your heart might circulate with something more than blood and oxygen.
Closing Space as a Way of Limiting Definition and Exclusion
Some words function as open compounds: the two words together, despite a space in between them, take on a new meaning. Think of kick drum, mini skirt, cargo shorts. For determiner expressions, however, the open variants do not have distinctive meanings. Only in their compound form—which is always closed, without spaces—does a new meaning emerge.
Consider the differences between every day and everyday. Every day refers to all definite days, as in “every day we touch I get this feeling.” On each and all of the days that we touch, the speaker gets that feeling. Everyday refers to something undefined, something expanded to become common or routine, as in “our everyday touch gives me this feeling.” This is a type of touch—one that has become regular—that precipitates the feeling.
Notice how every day, by being definable, maintains space for modification. For example: “every good day we touch I get this feeling.” This excludes days that are not good. Think of the textual space as creating a semantic space where further specificity can be added, creating exclusion of certain meanings.
Let’s apply this principle to “Everytime We Touch.”
If the line changed to read “Every Time We Touch,” there would be room for a modifier between the words every and time. For example: “Every Good Time We Touch.” However, the remainder of the song’s lyrics point to Cascada’s intention to maintain an all-encompassing and undefined everytime. The song’s bridge clarifies that, in fact, “the good and the bad times / we’ve been through them all,” in which case the titular line, if it did not use the compound everytime, would need amended to eliminate potential misreadings. But “Every Good and Bad Time We Touch” is not a good song title and would spoil the stresses in the melody.
If this seems extreme, it is. Grammar has a way of grabbing you by the mouth, the fingers, and saying, Listen, kid, it’s gonna be this way, in a nasty sort of 1940s mobster voice that makes you think this is not the type of person that you’d like to mess with (and grammar might also object to this use of prosopopoeia to humanize it, so proceed with caution). Except, because it’s grammar, despite the vaguely Brooklynite gangster drawl, grammar says, Listen, kid, your grammar is going to be spoken or written in this particular way that I am describing. Grammar is serious about this stuff.
There may exist in the world a false assumption that a 2000s Eurodance group would not have as much need for the nuances of grammar. This is mistaken. If Cascada has never expressed an interest in grammar, “Everytime We Touch” remains a testament to the group’s commitment to an undefined everytime. Consider a commonplace metaphor from the song’s second verse: “You make me rise when I fall.” Though this first appears as a cliché expression of support via ascension, that reading falls apart in the face of further metaphoric images:
Your arms are my castle
Your heart is my sky
Arms as castle align with the notion of support by both lifting up (a person literally stands within or upon a castle, which is itself traditionally built on higher ground) and protecting. In contrast, heart as sky places the speaker physically lower in the relationship and, furthermore, exposes the speaker to an open and unknown expanse. At the same time, the virtually limitless and inescapable nature of the sky serves as an encompassing and surrounding entity, like the castle. In other words, the everytime of “Everytime We Touch” resists defining its boundaries. It is an everytime that includes both above and below, exposed and protected, simultaneously.
For “Everytime We Touch,” everytime is a matter beyond grammar. It is a matter of consciousness and what we are willing to believe. It says this from the start. It says “I still hear your voice when you sleep next to me / I still feel your touch in my dreams.” Attempts to define this everytime are futile: it is a touch that foregoes the limits of even a physical world.
Determining Between the Specific and the Infinite
Had you ever heard music like this before? Was Cascada playing on the radio? Rihanna was. And maybe, it’s possible, that Rihanna was also playing in Abercrombie & Fitch, maybe Ne-Yo, maybe Dido, but because these were all playing on the radio and in any other store within the mall, they are forgettable to the Abercrombie & Fitch experience. You have to believe that “Everytime We Touch,” if it wasn’t the only song playing in Abercrombie & Fitch circa 2005, was the only song you heard. It was the only song that gave you some sense of how the choices you made would determine who you were as a person—no, that was clear before; this song gave you a sense that all the choices you made would determine who you were as a person: what clothes you wore, what color Walkman you owned, what color iPod you were going to get, what ringtone you would put on your cellphone, what ringtone you did put on your cellphone, how low you wore your pants, how you swooped your hair—all of this determined something about you. You believe that Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch,” playing out of the speakers in an Abercrombie & Fitch at the Dayton Mall from 2005-2007 taught you this. Because of that, you can never separate this song from any of that again—from the mall, from Abercrombie, from cargo shorts and social norms, from a desire to be cool and the inescapable scent “of marine breeze, sandalwood and sensual musk wood notes.”
What can we learn from this?
Though the differences between compound determiner expressions and their uncompounded equivalents is not entirely consistent, patterns do emerge. As with every day and everyday, a similar effect occurs when changing any time to anytime. Compare these two instances:
Any time we touch
We can touch anytime
As already established, the first example allows space for possible exclusions: “any good time we touch,” “any dreaming time we touch.” But further differences appear when considering a third example with greater syntactical similarity to the first example: “anytime we touch.”
Remember that determiner expressions with spaces between words are not open compounds wherein the words take on meanings distinct from their isolated usage, so any and time maintain their typical meanings. “Any time we touch” refers to any individual time we might touch, which remains a particular time even if the specifics of that time remain unknown. “Anytime we touch,” however, refers to an undefined range, not singular times but all collective times. Thus, compound determiners are a matter not only of exclusivity but also of specificity.
Let’s again consider “Everytime We Touch.”
To say “every time we touch I get this feeling” is to say that there are specific times we touch, and each of those times we touch I get this feeling. Every referring to time. But “everytime we touch I get this feeling” says something different. Everytime functions with a collective, indefinite meaning. This time is a time of all possible times—everytime.
Attempting to Escape from the Lifeless Grasp of Grammar to Come to a Conclusion of Meaning, or Significance, or Something Worth More Than Merely Overcoming the Squiggly Line Condemning Error
Suppose there was once a time when you believed that everytime would last forever. Suppose it was this time—at the cusp of secular, public education—when you left a world of defined order, uniforms and church three days a week, and tried to determine a new one from the codes of middle schools and malls. Recall that in this context you did not need grammar. Suppose that all you needed was “Everytime We Touch,” a dance beat with no regard for anything specific.
This is not to say that Cascada should receive too much credit. For the sake of historical frankness, it’s worth noting that the song is not even original. All the songwriting credits date to the Scottish singer/songwriter Maggie Reilly’s 1992 track “Everytime We Touch,” which sounds more Chris Isaak meets Belinda Carlisle than Cascada’s radio-ready techno for teenagers. What Cascada did is not a remix nor a cover. The choruses are the same but, aside from references to the sky, the rest of the songs are not. This makes little difference, however, as neither offers much of anything particular in their lyrics. One could imagine the lyrics of either replacing the other with little to no effect. “Everytime We Touch” is, as this grammatical explanation has been adamantly saying, not about the particular.
Particulars can fade away. You finished the sixth grade and the seventh grade and there were more grades after that. You abandoned the cargo shorts and bootleg jeans and those weird cord-like belts with the metal rings to cinch them to your waist. Things that once seemed inseparable separated. You have not set foot in an Abercrombie & Fitch in maybe fifteen years. The shirtless men disappeared, and you forgot about that brand name for a long time.
But grammar is forever, at least until we change it.
This is how grammar functions: through rules—rules that shift with time and place and context. It may seem ill-advised to use pop songs as sources of grammatical diagnosis and prescription, but it is worth considering that some amount of disregard for rules can allow for things otherwise impossible to say. What appears to be a pre-automatic-Spell Check carelessness in “Everytime We Touch” reveals, perhaps, a capacity for the momentary to become eternal, for the particular to become general.
Everytime is still an unacceptable compounding according to most every credible source. It prompts red squiggly lines and angry internet posts. But I am drawn to believe that another definition of this word exists. When it comes to music and art I am always prone to wanting to believe in the possibility of something less definite, something that moves beyond the specific and toward the opposite—the ill-defined and infinite.
Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio living in Tucson, Arizona. He once wore cargo shorts on a regular basis. His writing has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Hedgehog Review, and the Smart Set.