Hilary Duff doesn't want me to buy her record, and I'm OK with that.

I'm just a (fairly) regular dude, pushing 22 pretty hard, currently trying my darndest to get through college before I require Rogaine.

Hilary Duff is 17, rich and famous and blonde and cute (before you accuse me of something, I mean cute in the same way that game Candyland is cute), and in between making movies I don't see, she makes music I don't listen to. And that's fine, because Duff doesn't make music for males in the higher-learning set like myself; she makes it for affluent teenage girls just like her.

She doesn't bother me and I don't bother her.

But I never understood "niche" music. I don't live in the country, but I'll listen to country music. I'm hardly a natural woman, but I love Aretha. So since I don't believe there's music out there that isn't meant for me to listen to, I decided to get all up in Hilary's youth-oriented grill, via her new self-titled album. And what did I learn from my little experiment?

There really is some music that isn't meant for me. It's made by Hilary Duff.

For me, listening to Hilary is an extremely conflicting experience. On the one hand, she kind of sounds like she's singing Kidz Bop versions of her own songs; she'd never dare claim to be "not that innocent," and, in fact, she's pretty much the safest, most sterilized thing I've ever heard in pop. But at the same time, she's very into being 17, singing about teenage problems (self-esteem, being an individual, liking boys) that I can't begin to relate to. When I was 17, I had Pinkerton to keep me company. Duff makes nursery-rhyme rock, appealing to the lowest common denominator of boy-crazy, mall-shopping teenyboppers in training.

True, even I'm going to have to come to terms with the parts of Duff that rise above the sugared-cereal-like virtual marshmallows of glorious insipidness.

"Haters" (presumably about her feud with the maybe-three-years-from-late-night-Cinemax Lindsey Lohan) is mildly amusing, and it's fun to think about what a 17-year-old is doing singing a song giving props to the extremely dead "Mr. James Dean."

But even Hilary's inane-yet-undeniable smash "So Yesterday" towers over the pop pap of her new release, which makes you wonder if growing up isn't such a good thing after all. If you're going to be a lousy singer, you can at least buy some real songs to sing over lousily. This, like Lady Duff's movies and very silly former TV show, just doesn't give girls enough credit.

I'm not sure if it's her (her voice is pleasant but unexceptional) or her lackluster material that makes Hilary Duff bad, but even if I were a teenage girl, I hope I'd have the good sense to be too cool for this kind of junk.

If Hilary's still singing in 10 years, will she take the Alanis route and disavow her girly-pop past, or pull a Britney and try to keep the old hits relevant in the face of their immaturity? It sort of makes sense for a girl in her late teens to be singing about boys and being yourself (although mad props to Avril for not dumbing herself down like this when she was 17). But is that really going to play when she's older and, presumably, a little wiser? Hil's got this problem; her fans are going to grow old, too, and unless she wants to keep turning out gee-whiz tunes like these, something's going to have to change.

With tunes too dumb for the learner's permit set, and not quite Raffi enough for all those Lizzie McGuire fans still learning their times tables, I can't quite figure out who Hilary Duff thinks she's making this music for. But I tell you this much, fellow collegiates; it's not for you and me.