Robbed hit of the week 6/10/24 - Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday"...

 

 

"So Yesterday" - Hilary Duff

from the album Metamorphosis (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #42

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from actress and singer Hilary Duff, who was born in Houston, Texas, but moved with her sister and mother to Los Angeles when she was only six years old to ostensibly start a career as a child in show business (with her sister even younger). After appearing in commercials and bit parts acting, in 1998 Duff starred in the straight to video release Casper Meets Wendy, a "prequel" to the successful 1995 film version of Casper. Hilary's big break came at the start of 2001 when she was cast in the title character of the Disney Channel show Lizzie McGuire. The show became a huge success on the network, and a year later, amongst a truckload of merchandise around the show, a soundtrack was released, which peaked at #31 on the Billboard 200 sales tally and spent over a year on the list, going on to sell over a million copies. (Duff only sang on the opening track "I Can't Wait".) With that momentum, Duff released a holiday album under her own name, Santa Claus Lane, which came in at #154 on the Billboard 200 and only spent three weeks on the list (as do Christmas albums) but still sold over a half-million copies. Along with starring in the TV show, Hilary also made other movies, and in the spring of 2003 a Lizzie McGuire Movie came out, which made decent box office considering its low budget, and the accompanying soundtrack, which how had two Hilary tracks (along with two featuring sister Haylie), went to #6 on the Billboard 200 and sold over two million. A song from the record, "Why Not", was produced by Dan Hartman's collaborator Charlie Midnight and would be a top-40 hit in Australia and New Zealand, and be revised on her next release.

But also during this whirlwind 2003 Duff was recording a second studio album in her name, Metamorphosis, which came out only a couple months after the Lizzie film. The lead single from the record was "So Yesterday".  Written by Midnight with the production team The Matrix (Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards, and Scott Spock), who helmed Avril Lavigne's breakthrough, the song certainly tries to sell a squeaky-clean distillation of what they did for Avril. Like her, Hilary is giving the more polite send-off to an ex-boyfriend, sounding like it's been written for television. Duff's voice is processed enough to not sound out of place for the passive radio listener, with the guitar crunch in the production being tailor made for focus groups. With a music video that has Hilary playing "older" now with the litany of guys she flits by, which the Disney Channel/MTV play gave her a vast tween audience...

While "So Yesterday" climbed to #15 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Top-40 radio chart, the song stalled a couple notches below the top-40 on the main sales/airplay Hot 100 in October of 2003. Internationally, it was a bigger success, reaching the top ten in Canada (#2 Sales), the Netherlands (#4), Ireland (#6), France (#8), Australia (#8), and the United Kingdom (#9). The Metamorphosis album, released in August of that year, topped the Billboard 200 sales tally for a week, going on to spent 77 weeks on the list and selling over four million copies.

Her next single from the record would put Hilary into the top-40...

(4/10)

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Here's Duff appearing on the British chart show Top Of The Pops...

And lastly, in concert in 2007...