Some songs on Slayyyter’s 2019 mixtape conjure an image of Spears reborn as a seek-and-destroy Terminator. Slayyyter is part of the niche but growing online music scene variously described as “ hyperpop,” “ DIY pop,” or, in some cases, just “ Y2K.” That scene’s sound draws inspiration from the candied production of, say, Backstreet Boys, but is made on laptops rather than in recording studios and features not-so-radio-friendly amounts of sonic chaos. In another context, the song might seem like a mockery of Hilton. Hilton had paired old paparazzi shots of herself with Slayyyter’s song “Celebrity,” the lyrics of which are sung from the point of view of a cocaine-snorting rich kid with a leaked sex tape. Scrolling through Hilton’s TikTok recently, I heard the purring voice of one of my favorite Gen Z musicians, the 24-year-old singer Slayyyter. If we’re in for a roaring 2020s, might the decade revive the garish fun of the 2000s but be a little smarter about it? There’s reason to be both wary and giddy about such a desire.
Emerging tentatively from a pandemic and an apocalyptic political period, American culture seems hungry for a return to boom-time frivolity, but without the toxic social environment that underlaid it. The sizable audiences that pour in for each movie, podcast, and think piece about the horrors of the 2000s clearly also enjoy the trip down memory lane-a trip defined by images and songs that are now said to be the products of exploitation. Justin Timberlake even issued a vague apology to Spears and Janet Jackson, the latter of whom many people now say was unfairly scapegoated for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime-performance scandal. Jessica Simpson’s acclaimed 2019 autobiography strings together tales of misdeeds inflicted upon her by famous men. Britney Spears has become a mass-culture martyr through the #FreeBritney movement, which highlights the strange legal arrangement controlling her life today and the abusive media treatment she received in the 2000s. A 2020 YouTube documentary fleshed out her childhood trauma, played up her business acumen, and showed how becoming a national punch line after her sex tape leaked in 2004 was not an altogether happy experience. Hilton, for example, is part of a class of women experiencing widespread sympathy after being mocked, for years, as ditzes in low-rise denim. Fashion’s famous maxim that trends move in 20-year cycles continues to hold true, but this revisitation, in the way of so many recent cultural waves, coincides with a moral reckoning too. In the music world, Ariana Grande sampled ’NSync, Olivia Rodrigo released a Paramore-inspired single, and Travis Barker of Blink-182 has become one of the hot producers of the moment. TikTok users upvote videos of creaky five-disc CD changers whirring into action. Instagram models now flaunt the trucker-hat brand Von Dutch. For the past few years, Y2K-era aesthetics have edged back into hipness. Modern influencers certainly seem to think so. Maybe the 2000s don’t belong entirely in the trash? Suddenly the photo and its implications seem less sinister.
It’s a small but significant difference: Hilton’s shirt was fun-sassy, not villain-sassy. She then showed the original picture as proof. Superimposing her 40-year-old present self in front of the image of her at 24-she has not aged-she explained that someone had Photoshopped the word poor on top of what had been the word desperate.
Hilton corrected the record this month on TikTok. Or at least STOP BEING POOR, the real clincher (which is still inspiring memes), is. Here, in other words, was a document of obliviousness being marketed as aspirational. Here was an essay in an overlit photograph, connecting 2000s celebrity culture to Bush-era tax policies and mortgage lenders. Hilton’s bronzed midriff peeked out below her shirt’s aristocratic slogan and above the pink folds of-this isn’t a joke-a peasant skirt. The crowd around her wielded flip phones and digital cameras, then-new tech that turned normies into paparazzi. The heiress and reality-TV star grinned and threw her arms in the air in a gesture of calculated abandon. If any image captured the chaos of early-2000s pop culture, it was one viral shot of Paris Hilton, in 2005, wearing a shirt that said STOP BEING POOR.
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