Photos: Maggie Vaughn/Shepherd Express
As dance and electronic music have emerged over the last decade as music’s largest growth industry, festivals around the world have sprouted to meet the demand. Even rock-minded gatherings like Coachella and Lollapalooza have dedicated more of their lineup each year to dance music. One music festival that's remained indifferent to EDM’s popularity, however, is the one that bills itself as the world’s largest. This year Summerfest only booked one major DJ, and it's probably the last name that many EDM aficionados wanted to see on the bill: Paris Hilton, the walking embodiment of dance music's image problem. For those who disparage dance culture as vain, materialistic and status-obsessed, the celebrity heiress and reality TV star is all too happy to reinforce those stereotypes. She performed Sunday night at Summerfest’s Harley-Davidson Roadhouse alongside video montages of her walking red carpets and modeling bikinis.
Hilton's booking stirred headlines this spring, following a righteous petition to remove her from Summerfest's lineup on the grounds that she’s “a disgrace to dance music and is a perfect example of what spoiled celebrities do when they’re bored.” While rumors of her awfulness have been overblown—fanned, in part, by a notorious fail photo of a man crouched behind her control board at one of her first shows, tweaking the knobs for her—it's true that she hasn't mastered all the technical nuances of the gig. She looked lost behind her board at times, and struggled with her levels throughout her entire set. The audio cut out for a solid minute during one song early on, though it's unclear whether that was her fault or not.
The bigger problem was her reliance on pre-programmed mixes. A more responsive DJ could have changed course when her playlist lost the crowd’s attention, which happened periodically, especially during some of the deeper house cuts she peppered between sugary dance hits like Alesso's “Heroes (We Could Be)” and Kygo's “Firestone.” Her preferred trick for jolting the crowd, hardly a novel one, was to toss an abrupt rock song into the mix every 10 minutes or so, first “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” then Hozier's “Take Me To Church” and eventually “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” and “Seven Nation Army.” She elicited a hearty arena chant from the crowd with that last one, but mostly the digressions were arbitrarily integrated, halting most of the momentum she built up with her dance tracks.
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And yet for all its clumsiness, Hilton’s set got the job done. Her drops were loud and frequent, which is all the audience asked for, and they responded on cue, with boisterous cheers and raised hands. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of DJs that the festival could have booked instead that would have delivered the same result, most of them with better crowd skills, bigger light shows and none of Hilton’s stigma, and hopefully in the years to come Summerfest will bring in many of them. But in the meantime, for a festival that sometimes lags a few years behind the times, Hilton’s booking was a start—not a prestigious start, but a start.
