Pop
Hilary Duff
Dignity
**
She’s just asking for it, right? I mean, Hilary Duff might as well have called her third album Way Classier Than That Slut Lindsay Lohan. Instead, it gets the self-righteous title Dignity, and finds the maturing tween star leaving behind the sunny, guitar-driven sound of her early work and recasting herself as a dance diva, with about as much success as she had with her old rock-oriented style.
The difference is that, at the advanced age of 19, Duff has become a jaded veteran of the celebrity life, and thus much of Dignity’s lyrics are chastisements aimed at two-faced rivals (the awful “Gypsy Woman”), pesky stalkers (“Dreamer”) and, well, that slut Lohan (the title track, which could also be aimed at Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or any of their ilk).
“Where’s your dignity?/I think you lost it in the Hollywood Hills,” Duff sings, and though her eschewing of partying antics is admirable, she sounds more like a dour spoilsport than, say, the confident woman of Pink’s “Stupid Girls,” a song with a similar message.
Duff’s producers have improved on getting her voice to approximate singing, and she actually sounds appealing on bubbly, ’80s-style tunes “Never Stop” and “Between You and Me.” If she weren’t so concerned with preserving her dignity, maybe the rest of the album would be enjoyable, too.