Hilary Duff’s ‘So Yesterday': #TBT Feel Good Song
What better way to kick off a #TBT series than with a song titled “So Yesterday”? The single from child star-turned-pop phenomenon and teenage icon Hilary Duff’s sophomore album, Metamorphosis, remains a millennial classic (and dare we say rager among the Avril Lavigne-loving emo tween crowd?). It premiered on AOL Music in June of 2003, basically confirming that the track is dated AF.
Having become a household name through Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire and reaching substantial airplay on Radio Disney with songs like “Why Not” and “What Dreams Are Made Of”, Duff’s fan base was quite young. Her record label wanted to help the singer reach an older, more mature audience and “So Yesterday” accomplished exactly that, illustrating Duff as a strong, remorseless girl unceremoniously moving on after a breakup. In the music video—which was obviously huge during the days of TRL—we see her playing pranks on boys, wearing heavy black eyeliner and a leather glove (only on her right hand, because “punk rock”), and pulling some serious Lenny Kravitz rock star moves. It may seem a little vanilla now, but Duff actually was the coolest thing on the streets those days (if you were a gay teenage boy, anyway).
In the song, Duff tells an ex that if he wants to move on, she gets to keep all of his clothes—because she looks bomb in them. There’s a lot of catty passive aggressiveness here, which this writer lives for, but it also makes us wonder how deep this relationship was in the first place. A couple of lyrical gems:
If the light is off / Then it isn’t on
If it’s over / Let it go and come tomorrow / It will seem so yesterday
You made my mind up for me / When you started to ignore me
Whether you’re going through a breakup or not, there’s surely something you can find that just feels, like, sooo yesterday. Your job? So yesterday. Taxes? So yesterday. Getting out of bed when the world around you is collapsing at alarming rates—whether it be natural disasters or the most worrying political administration the U.S. has seen in decades, perhaps ever? SO YESTERDAY! Hit play and remember—you’re just a bird that’s already flown away.
The Pop Princesses of 2003: