Paris Hilton’s “Never Be Alone” Is The Dance Dance Revolution Classic You Didn’t Know You Wanted

Paris Hilton is a few things—a (reformed?) racist, a homophobe, a serial, possibly accidental animal abuser—and she is also occasionally a musician. People will probably chafe at that last description more than the others, because it's less quantifiable; yes, she can officially add "award-winning DJ" to her resume if she so wishes, but that doesn't exactly guarantee you a Panorama Bar residency these days. But! "Stars Are Blind," Hilton's 2006 single, was surprisingly great, a Bush-era update of "La Isla Bonita" that still sounds like a thousand dollars.

Her new single, "Never Be Alone," sounds like $199.99, and that's not necessarily a knock—that's how much it costs to buy a brand-new copy of Dance Dance Revolution for PS3, and a playable dance mat, on Amazon. As a suburban wastrel, I spent almost too much time in high school hitting combo after combo on a PS2-compatible dance mat in my parents' basement, forcing my comparably, inadequately footwork-fancy friends to watch me as I busted every tricky move to absolute stone-cold classics like DJ Sammy's "Heaven" and Pet Shop Boys' "Go West." (Brief anecdotal aside: I remember going to Long Beach Island with a friend's family for a week and blowing it out on a boardwalk DDR arcade console; my friend's dad said snidely after I made 'em watch my feet, "That'll pay the bills someday." How you like me now?!?)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the utterly synthetic-to-the-point-where-it's-freezing "Never Be Alone," which floated around last year in snippet form, features someone named DJ Poet (who I'm not actually sure is a poet, but hey), and is making the rounds today in questionably official form, gives me the chills because it mines nostalgia for a certain strain of dance music—specifically, bright, springy, booming big-room trance-pop that you can find hints of in everything from PC Music's joking-not-joking electro-pop to the retro-futuristic visions of Acephale artist Doss, to "pointillist trance" producer Lorenzo Senni's warped aesthetic. It's cheesy, tart-sounding, and maybe would've been better off as a Britney Spears single (semi-related: when's the last time you listened to "Perfume"?)—and it's also deathless in its embrace of the title's sentiment, a melody that sounds like it could be on an endless loop and still bring maximal satisfaction. It's like the song says: I'm finding it hard to believe we're in heaven—but, hey, there's worse places to be than the here and now.

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