Hilary Duff, one time Disney Channel star and pop songstress behind such classics as “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean,” is in the process of working on a new studio album, her first since 2008. Duff’s new song “All About You,“ is a notable departure from her previous work. It’s more brooding, it rarely lets Duff’s voice dip toward a whine, and it’s, notably, much, much, much less insane.
Quiz: Hilary Duff’s lyrics or a line from the short story The Yellow Wallpaper?
Starting in 2003, Duff released five studio albums in five years, each one stranger than the last. Her most famous song, by far, was “Come Clean,“ which was released in 2003 and became the theme song for Laguna Beach, whose 10th anniversary we celebrate this weekend. By the time her 2008 album came out, the new lyrics had reached peak-wackadoo. Wait. But how wackadoo is ”peak-wackadoo”?
A good way to define peak-wackadoo is by holding it to the standards of a famous literary character who was actually, legitimately insane, the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Like many of Hilary Duff’s songs, “The Yellow Wallpaper” starts off romantic. At the beginning, it seems like the story of a woman vacationing in a grand house. By the end of the story, though, the woman herself has gone madly insane in a horribly creepy way, thanks to the awful treatment she sustains at the hands of a man and society. Not coincidentally, this is also the arc of pretty much every Hilary Duff song.
It’s time to test your knowledge. Who said the following quote? Was it Hilary Duff in one of her many pop songs, or the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”?
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