March 15th, 2007 at 11:00 by Stuart Heritage
It s not so difficult being big on the internet - all you need is to wiggle your boobs around and look vaguely available to nerds. Abi Titmuss has done it, Paris Hilton has done it and now Tila Tequila is doing it all over the place with her MySpace page.
For the uninitiated, Tila Tequila Nguyen is a sweary little Asian American model in a bra who shouts Love me!
a lot and sings songs while sort of writhing around a chair a bit. This alone has made Tila Tequila the most popular person on the whole of MySpace - and now Tila Tequila is trying to break into the music business too. Only being the feisty little rebel she is, Tila Tequila is doing it completely by herself.
Completely. Except for the bit where she got giant global production company Endemol to help her out. And the bit where she got represented by the talent agency in charge of Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp.
And the bit where she s included on the roster of the Universal Music Group s MySpace page. Those aside, Tila Tequila is doing this completely by herself.
We can t help being a little bit suspicious of MySpace, you know.
Sure, we manage to find the occasional nugget with our weekly feature, but there sure are a lot of nobsacks out there whose sole purpose on the planet is to make you cry in pubs by never shutting up about how many MySpace friends they ve got. We imagine that if we ever met Tila Tequila, this is exactly what she d do to us, too, after she d showed us her tits and then painstakingly explained why doing that made her a rebel, of course. Tila Tequila s MySpace page has had over half a billion views, and she s got 1.
7 million friends. Excluding the 1.69 million that s made up of lonely boys hoping to see her nipples, that s pretty good going.
And now Tila Tequila wants to transfer this success to the music business with a new single called I Love U. Musically, there s not a great deal separating I Love U from that other great MySpace success story , but it looks like Tila Tequila might make a go of it; partly because she s half Suicide Girl, half lonelygirl15 and half Jessica Simpson, and partly because she s so determined to operate outside of the music industry that she s prone to screaming fits of hyperbole like this on the :
WILL YOU JOIN THE BATTLE??
??
The future of the music business is being re-written - NOW.
Have you ever had the power to make a massive change? Start a war; stop a war; forge a new path; break down old barriers? Have you, a friend, a neighbor, or even someone you don t like, struggled for years to achieve a dream that a few people control the outcome of, and they tell you that you can t do it?
If 99 was a step toward changing all that, would you spend it?
Tila Tequila turned down two record deals, believing that having absolute control over the kind of music she released and how she was portrayed was more important than being part of the system. She s done it all on her own up to this point, so why not continue?
Tila has recorded music, picked a single, shot a video, and is set to release everything WITHOUT the help of a label. She is convinced that she knows what her fans want, not some corporate A R guy at that multibillion dollar company, watching their bottom line. It s about music.
And freedom.
Yeah! Freedom!
Revolution! Woo! Have you ever had the power to start a war?
Stop a war? No? Us neither, so let s all buy a shitty single by an annoying attention spaz like Tila Tequila and hope it ll make do instead.
But if that wasn t bad enough, all of Tila Tequila s I m going it alone to beat the system! shtick starts to look a bit strange when you consider that she signed with Endemol to make the video to I Love U, signed with music company INgrooves to distribute it and recently joined the ranks of the United Talent Agency for all areas of her representation. Worse still, Will.
i.am - he of the and announced on MTV TRL last April that Tila Tequila had signed to his Will.i.
am Music Group, part of A M Records. Although Tila Tequila isn t listed as part of Will.i.
am s roster at the moment, she is listed on the roster on the , which is fishy to say the least.
We ve seen this kind of MySpace trickery in the past, of course. When Arctic Monkeys first made it big, it was claimed that the band s strong grass-roots MySpace support was the key, even though the group themselves admitted they didn t really know what MySpace was, and Lily Allen s success was said to be down to MySpace, even though her Dad was in Shallow Grave, she used to live with Harry Enfield and she was possibly offered a job as a Sugababe once.
When you make friends on the internet, it creates a false sense of camaraderie to trade off. We know this more than anyone - just ask any of our 18 Russian brides.
So are Tila Tequila s 1.
7 million MySpace friends being sold a lie by a big music company? Could be - we ve yet to be given proof otherwise. But then you have to ask yourself, does it matter about 1.
7 million people being tricked if they re being tricked into liking shit like this?
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