Ashley Alexandra Dupre, Unspoken words

Two stars out of five

There are many ways to gain publicity for your music in a desperately overcrowded marketplace. You can sell your album on the internet using an honesty box system that allows customers to pay whatever they like, as Radiohead recently did.

You can perform a "secret" live performance in a London record store that immediately becomes so over-subscribed that it has to be moved to a different venue for health and safety reasons, as Radiohead again recently did.

Or you can move to Manhattan, set yourself up as a $1,000-a-night prostitute with the international escort agency Emperors Club VIP and become embroiled with the governor of New York state, thus sparking a political sex scandal that forces him to resign.

Radiohead have apparently balked at the latter course — wayward New York politicians are thus safe from the come-hither eyes and bedroom body of Thom Yorke — but Ashley Alexandra Dupre did not.

The call girl at the centre of the Eliot Spitzer scandal turns out to be a struggling musician and a firm believer in the Irish playwright Brendan Behan's maxim about all publicity being good publicity.

Within hours of being revealed as the prostitute heard discussing Spitzer on a tapped phone, Dupre had uploaded a new track to online music retailer Amie Street.

The website attempted to direct shoppers to more wholesome fare — it was busy recommending Satanic Panic In The Attic by US indie band Of Montreal.

But alas, their efforts were in vain, Of Montreal having carelessly neglected to sleep with any state governors recently.

"It's definitely the most traffic we've ever had," an Amie Street spokesman said.

Along with some sad stuff about running away from an abusive home, Dupre's Myspace webpage — 7,000,000 plus hits and counting — lists the country singer Patsy Cline and the soul diva Etta James among her inspirations.

But it is hard to hear much of their influence in Dupre's music beyond some of the latter's trademark earthiness, in either Move Ya Body or What We Want. They are straightforward R&B influenced pop: there's a touch of celebrated production duo The Neptunes in the clattering beat and squealing synthesisers of Move Ya Body and a hint of their great rival Timbaland in the faux-Oriental background of What We Want.

Sadly, the songs are no great shakes, and her voice is a bit monotonic and undistinguished, although the sort of person who demands his or her music carry the tang of authenticity will presumably be intrigued by the lyrics, which paint Dupre as a very game girl indeed: "Make me nasty, show me what you need, bend me over, take me there … pull it like you want it, toss me all around."

"Sex, money, drugs is what I'm all about," she sings at another juncture.

It's nothing you haven't already heard from a hundred raunchy pop divas, but at least couldn't accuse Dupre of hollow posturing.

And, given the route by which almost everybody came to hear her songs, she certainly seems to have raised the bar in terms of promoting one's music: whatever else you may think of her, she has made playing an unscheduled ''guerrilla gig'' on a tube train look a trifle underwhelming.