Wild child Lindsay Lohan has slowly turned into a huge hot-air balloon that’s soaring right up into the starry sky. And an immense amount of hype has been acting as the energy or the fuel that helps maintain her flight. Boob implants, car crashes, wild parties, a love failure, a few Disney movies thrown in between and now a full-length pop album ? Lindsay Lohan has been through the Hollywood dream deal all right. But unlike other celebrities worth their salt who have made it the hard way, Lindsay remains sans any back-up fuel or the kind that she could regenerate with her kind of ‘star-power’ and stay afloat.

So what does she do? Generate more hype, and then even more hype until the balloon reaches outer space, and by the time it comes sagging down, Lindsay Lohan would have stashed away cash enough to launch herself either a restaurant chain or maybe another celebrity-oriented business enterprise. And by that time there would have been many more teen idols like her charting a similar route.

A relatively successful actress, Lindsay made her major music move with Ultimate, the theme song of Freaky Friday (2003) ? the film she also starred in with Jamie Lee Curtis as costar. The song became a major hit and propelled the movie soundtrack album onto the Billboard Top 20. Her simmering desire of becoming an arena rocking popstar was fulfilled with her debut album Speak (Universal; Rs 150) hitting stores last year; adding a rush of extra celeb points against her name. Now here was yet another teen actor/singer taking her shot at becoming another JLo. But despite its success, Speak was universally trashed by critics who called it a distastefully created modern rock album. Its success also projected the pot-smoking Lindsay as an ever-popular and highly sexed-up teen icon who got so hot that she could burn whatever she wanted, and at will. All that carefully created hype turned Speak into a chartburner and the Lindsay balloon soared higher.

Speak was a quickie when it came to production time and it was all too evident by the way the record had shaped up. Coming to music style, Lindsay tried to woo the very fans Avril Lavigne had connected with great success, and that was one hell of a risk she was taking as an aspiring musician. Not only did the tracks sound too chart-oriented to be taken seriously, they also betrayed Lindsay’s attempt; however sincere she might have wanted it to sound, at emerging a popstar with substance and staying power. The album opens with the super-silly First which also is the theme song for her latest flick, Herbie Fully Loaded ? a track that aimed to charge up teeny-boppers with its high energy, raise-your-hands kind of anthemic delivery. Also a track that the fans of Avril Lavigne would probably snigger at, for its evident lack of depth and cliched display of energy. Move on to Nobody ’til you and Symptoms of you and there is a bit of hope but still not to the level one would expect from a Billboard Top 20 rocker.

The real problem with the record or rather with Lindsay Lohan turned out to be that she couldn’t really distinguish her own forte, if there was one to begin with. On one hand she was struggling hard to rock like the Avrils on a major portion of the album and on the other she was actually sounding well placed on bouncy JLo kind of dance tracks like Rumours and Magnet. Lohan could have actually gathered more credibility as a singer had she released an EP instead, consisting of three or four of the stronger tracks on Speak. But in the end, she ended up sounding like one of the numerous young ladies in the punk rock scene trying hard to make the world stand up to her tunes ? something she didn’t really need to do at all.

Lindsay Lohan turns 19 tomorrow. Here’s a quote from her when she was asked about the rumours surrounding her breasts ? “I’ve got to do something to dispel these nasty rumours, so I’ve decided the best way to prove they are real is to let my fans pet them. I’m opening a petting zoo in LA that will have sheep, goats, rabbits and, of course, my tits. And then, “I was kind of chubby and flat until a little while ago. But some time when I was 17, I think it was the last week in October, I finally blossomed out.” Speak no more.