For Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the high-priced escort known as “Kristen” caught up in the prostitution scandal that brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the clock on converting her 15 minutes of fame/infamy into a music career has started running. But she’s probably used to that.
After an initial wave of interest in her music, especially the single “What We Want,” led to radio airplay and online sales on Thursday, curiosity started to give way to indifference or even anger yesterday. “The jury is in and the response has been extremely negative,” said Sharon Dastur, program director at New York’s influential pop station Z100, which began playing “What We Want” on Thursday, but removed it from its playlist yesterday. “The reaction was almost 95 percent negative.”
Dastur said the station played the song because of its importance to pop culture, not because of its musical value. When the station was flooded with responses ranging fom that song “makes me want to scratch my eyes out” to “I’d rather listen to the Paris Hilton album in its entirety than hear that song again,” Dastur said she knew it was time to pull it after only six plays.
On the online retailer Amie Street, where Dupre’s songs “What We Want” and “Move Ya Body” are for sale, purchases dropped dramatically yesterday. Neither song was in the Top 200 Friday, though the massive sales on Thursday led both songs to the top two spots for the week and the month.
New York DJ Jay Smooth, who remixed Dupre’s “What We Want” with Snoop Dogg’s hit “Sexual Eruption,” saw his combination crack YouTube’s most watched videos yesterday, which led to mixed feelings. “It feels strange to get the most attention for my most frivolous work,” said Smooth, a WBAI hip-hop DJ who first posted the remix on his influential illdoctrine.com blog. “My hope is that people will see this and check out my work on more substantial topics... or see that it showcases the creativity in hip-hop.”
Smooth said yesterday that he was torn about keeping the mash-up online, but he did want to try to do something positive for Dupre. "I felt bad for the girl and all of the negative attention that was going to be heaped on her," he said.
Dastur said Dupre’s future in music doesn’t seem too bright, though “Nowadays, you never really know.”