Undiscovered (Walmart Version)

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Another unlikely pop singer to hop aboard the indiscriminate good ship Storchaveli, Brooke Hogan -- it's just "Brooke" henceforth, or at least for the time being -- is stuck in an awkward phase where she's too young to be convincing as a vixen and too old to relate to younger teenagers. Lead single "About Us" tells you more than you need to know. "I'm just tryin' to live, but you're all up in my grill/How's a girl to breathe with the media staring down my mouth with a four-inch lens/I just wanna hit the mall with some of my friends." This is delivered with a Beyoncé-aping flow in a not-too-pleasant voice that resembles an exaggerated (or piercing) version of Gwen Stefani. She's backed by Paul Wall's half-alert "Naw"s and "They don't know, baby"s. That's gross. Produced mostly by Scott Storch (everybody), the comparisons to Paris Hilton's album are inevitable, even though the two celebrities-turned-singers are at different stages in their lives. Hilton's album effectively rides on the entitled heiress persona that dozens of middle-class singers have attempted before, whereas Undiscovered sounds exactly like the kind of album made by the teenaged Floridian daughter of a professional wrestler. Brooke tries way too hard to be authentic and taken seriously, and though some of the material is mildly enjoyable, the batch of productions she is given is noticeably weak when they're stacked up against the tracks on Paris. (Scott Storch played his cards right, but if he's going to work on a sequel to this, he should check out the Bratz albums.) Brooke does drop the seriousness on the throwaway finale, but it doesn't fare any better. Anyone who knows War's "Low Rider" will likely flinch at the sight of the track's title; sure enough, "Low Rider Jeans" adopts some of the words and all of the notes of its chorus: "Low rider jeans hug a little tighter."
© Andy Kellman /TiVo