No. 33: Heidi Montag, “Higher”

Christopher R. Weingarten | November 4, 2009 1:00 pm

The Hills have whys.

I’ll assume that that you, as a loyal Idolator fan, are not a mouth-breathing dipshit who secretly wishes People used fewer words with two syllables. I’ll assume you’re not a dead-eyed blank slate who would refresh TMZ 200 times a day, if only the warm, relentless waterfall of drool that would result could manage to stay in your agape mouth and not drip onto your laptop’s trackpad in cheerless slime puddles, rendering it useless. No, that’s not you. That’s not you at all. So, I guess I’ll have to explain who Heidi Montag is. Heidi Montag is the “star” of MTV’s “reality” “entertainment” program The Hills, which peels back the curtain on the dull relationship drama and inconsequential feuds of awful Los Angeles famesuckers. (I’m not 16 years old, so I’ve only seen some ads for it that showed some tanned ladies and blonde bohunks struggling to read things off cue cards and being hella sad at their zero-th world problems.) Montag was also on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, which leads me to conclude that she is not only a celebrity, but a person who will eat bugs for money. In 2007 she reportedly signed a one-song contract with Warner Music Group. But fuck the man! Heidi is punk rock! D.I.Y.! She couldn’t wait for the machine to give her image the molding and shaping it desperately needed—so she self-released her first single and video. “Higher” starts with a bunch of lightning-bolt zaps, presumably to tell the audience that this Frankenstein monster of bad ideas from the early ‘90s is alive. She sings “I’m only going higher, higher/I’m gonna take it higher, higher,” which would be like some Blue Angels shit if a) it wasn’t on some ninth-tier Timbaland ripoff beat with goofy autotune b) this song had any chance of propelling her music career beyond “’Numa Numa’-style Internet meme.” The bridge, where she just starts yelling “Higher! Higher! Higher!” is the kicker—as the notes get increasingly high, she gets increasingly out of tune. Spread your wings and fly, people! Why are you all so afraid to spread your wings and fly? And of course there’s the hilarious video, in which she rolls around in the sand, showing off her ribs and hip bones. It was filmed by her equally useless husband Spencer Pratt with a camcorder, boom box, two takes, and what he admits was “20 minutes.” The Internet had the completely understandable reaction of “GUUUUUUHHHHHHHH.” Heidi told Us about her reaction to the vicious but totally reasonable things people wrote about “Higher” on the ol’ Interweb: “I just started sobbing uncontrollably… I cried myself to sleep that first night after my video came out. I just couldn’t understand why people I didn’t even know felt the need to be so cruel and hurtful toward me. I am just a 21-year-old from a small town in Colorado trying to follow her dreams.” It’s probably because your dreams amount to not much more than “be famous at any cost,” and your video proved you don’t have a molecule of talent to back any of it up. But to be fair, Colorado is a nice place! Heidi Montag – “Higher” [YouTube] Heidi Montag [Twitter] F2K: Idolator Counts Down The 50 Worst Songs Of The ’00s, One By Ear-Splitting One