The punks said that anyone can be a musician. But to prove that wrong, listen to Kim Kardashian’s 2011 single “Jam (Turn It Up).” It’s a pop-EDM song that somehow manages to be listless, alienating, and overstimulating all at once.
Of course, you can’t blame Kardashian for trying her luck in pop music. Music history is littered with models, socialites and tabloid figures who thought making a record was their ticket to lasting fame—or who genuinely believed they had musical talent worth sharing with the world. For every Karen Elson—who parlayed her modeling career into a successful one as an alt-country darling—there’s a Tyra Banks, whose reportedly six-year quest to break into pop music yielded only one song, the dismal Shake Ya Body .
Still, the model-turned-singer is the career twist that refuses to die. This month sees the release of Paris Hilton’s sophomore album, Infinite Icon – her follow-up to 2006’s maligned and ultimately re-evaluated Paris , which yielded the now cult single Stars Are Blind – and a new album from Suki Waterhouse, whose music career has been so outrageously successful – with 500 million streams on Spotify alone – that it’s likely much of her Gen Z fanbase isn’t even aware of her former life as the face of Burberry.
“If you have that kind of fame, why not parlay it into something that can make you more money?” says Rich Juzwiak, a critic who has written extensively about Hilton’s extensive business ventures. “For a lot of people, it’s probably not that different from investing in real estate. You get a little bit more of a public ego kickback, but I think it’s just a way to diversify your portfolio based on the belief that this is going to be easy.”
Juzwiak says Samantha Fox is the only model-turned-musician who “launched a viable pop career,” having a No. 3 single with Touch Me (I Want Your Body) in 1986. “She was always so rejected, but she’s the real template, and I think the reason for that is because she leaned so much into the Page 3 thing,” he says of her frequent topless appearances in the Sun. “She was a woman who was very sexual in public and she said, ‘OK, what if I did that sonically?’ And it totally worked.” Grace Jones was even more successful in finding music to match her dramatic, even terrifying, appearance; her recording career stretches from the late ’70s to the present.
Aligning your music with the narrative of your career, as Juzwiak puts it, often works better than simply picking an A-list producer and praying for chart success. When American model, actress, tabloid figure, recording artist, podcaster, designer and author Julia Fox released her debut single, Down the Drain, this year, it felt more like a curiosity born of a genuine desire to create something extraordinary than a bid for pop stardom. True to the song’s gritty, art-kid aesthetic, Fox debuted the track at Charli xcx’s much-hyped Boiler Room show in Brooklyn and reportedly blew the speakers out—a Bianca Jagger-at-Studio-54 moment for the terminally online Zoomer crowd.
But generally speaking, models-turned-musicians aim for the top of the charts. But that doesn’t always work out so well. In 1994, four years after appearing on Vogue’s iconic Supermodels cover, Naomi Campbell released Baby Woman , her first – and to date last – album. Popular producers like Gavin Friday, Tim Simenon and Youth, AKA Martin Glover, not to mention a video in which Campbell looks stunning in the company of elephants, weren’t enough to save the album from commercial oblivion – it failed to chart in the UK.
Glover says that success is never guaranteed when you’re making a pop record, even if you’re one of the most famous people in the world: “It’s like when Mick Jagger makes a solo album and no one buys it.” When he worked with Campbell on Baby Woman – a cover of Sunshine on a Rainy Day, which he wrote with his then-wife, Zoe, in 1990 – Glover was working from a five-room studio in Brixton and had a staff of about 15. “I’d never seen the place as excited as when Naomi walked in – the whole place was jumping. Someone with that kind of range, there’s this kind of enchanted atmosphere around them,” he says. But the star of the day, it turned out, wasn’t Campbell: “What even surpassed Naomi’s charisma and buzz was her mother – she was almost more beautiful than Naomi, and charming as well. It was great fun.”
Contrary to the assumption many have of non-musicians turning to music, Glover says Campbell “could basically hold a melody – this was before AutoTune” – and that she was easy to work with, despite her formidable reputation. “She was very easy to conduct – I mean, she’s no Céline Dion, but she’s no Brigitte Bardot either” – who had hits in her native France with Serge Gainsbourg. “The song wasn’t ambitious enough to make it difficult and she sang it with some emotion – which is great.”
Not every musician hired to collaborate with a model or socialite on a record says the same. When asked for comment for this article, a songwriter who worked on Hilton’s first album said they would “politely decline. As our mothers always taught us, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, on the other hand, says he’s “done coke and hung out with models for 20 years, so I know a lot about it.” He’s a longtime friend of Kate Moss and, along with producer Gibby Haynes, enlisted the legendary model to sing Dutch electronic duo Arling & Cameron’s “Dirty Robot” on The Lemonheads’ 2009 covers album. “Kate’s smart, she’s like the girl next door: she’s pretty, yeah, but I think it’s her brains that got her where she is,” Dando says.
Moss, he adds, prefers listening to music to making it, but has nevertheless been involved in projects with bands including Oasis, Primal Scream and Babyshambles, the solo project of her ex-boyfriend Pete Doherty. “She would rather put her leg up and pretend it was a guitar – she goes into fan mode,” says Dando. “If we were in Jamaica, she would be the one staying up all night singing with me. She loved singing [the Velvet Underground’s] Sweet Jane over and over again, or coming up with new lyrics for My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music. She’s really good at it visually – one time a Natalie Imbruglia song came on and she went and dressed like her and made her hair look like her.”
Dando cites red-haired Lancastrian Elson as a prime example of a model who has a genuine artistic urge to make music. “All the pretty girls like to take pictures of their feet, but that doesn’t make them photographers,” he says. “The ones who don’t have the talent won’t stick with it, but the ones who do will.”
Commitment is what separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to transitioning to pop, says Juzwiak. He mentions Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind” — a hit, but not a surefire hit when it came out: “That song is good, but I don’t think Paris Hilton makes that song good. She delivers it — she didn’t blow it. Whereas I could totally hear Gwen Stefani sing that song and own it, because she has that pop thing that makes her really compelling.”
It’s clear that there’s a lot more to pop stardom than looking great on camera. “You either have it or you don’t,” Juzwiak concludes. “And you find out pretty quickly after you step on stage whether you have it or not.”