Review: Hilary Duff, ‘Hilary Duff’

Hilary Duff is signed to Hollywood Records, the sister label of Disney, which just so happens to be the company that, for fear of pissing off the multi-billion-dollar-corporation-friendly administration, refused to let Miramax release Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary in which Britney Spears professed her unwavering support for the president. What a tangled web the tweens have weaved. Surely the Texas-born Duff got a hefty tax break thanks to Uncle Dubya, but in a recent interview, she and her sister admitted to being ignorant to the current state of politics.

The first thing I learned from Hilary Duff is that Duff has secrets…many, many secrets (the implication being, presumably, that she’s been a very bad girl), and these secrets are threatening to tear her apart. “Everybody knows I’m a little insane,” she sneers on “Don’t You Want Me?,” while the terminally sanguine “I Am” is what Alanis Morissette might sound like if she had a lobotomy.

But Duff really can’t be held responsible for most of the album’s insipid lyrical content, seeing as how she only contributed lyrics to four tracks. Hilary Duff is a bit more personal than its predecessor in that the singer told her assigned army of songwriters about the things going on in her life (a little Lindsay Lohan here, a little Aaron Carter there…), but even when she gets in on the action things feel contrived (on “Rock This World,” she offers this bit of insight: “I don’t wanna save the day/I just wanna get my way!”). “Haters,” dedicated to people like me no doubt, is the best song on the entire album, if only because you finally get a tiny glimpse at the real Hilary Duff.

Getting back to politics (and I never thought I’d be saying that in a Hilary Duff review), there’s a song on Hilary Duff called “Cry,” in which she says stuff like “cry war,” “cry freedom,” and “cry peace” (she uses the word “cry” exactly 20 times and then switches it up toward the end by replacing it with the word “try”). But it’s “Dangerous to Know” that truly captures the state of the U.S. today: “Ignorance is bliss/You’re safe when you resist,” Duff sings during the song’s bridge. Okay, so she’s talking about a kiss, not imposing imperialistic foreign policy on the world, but it would be the perfect theme song for Bush’s inevitable post-win rally: “Who said the truth’s gonna save you?/When the truth could be dangerous…It’s all right to steal/What I need from you/Do what I have to do/Say what I have to say.” From the mouths of tweens to the ears of the leader of the free world.