On the cover, the starlet — who officially turned 18 in July of 2004 — looks like a thirtysomething porn star, and she has the heavy-breathing voice and double entendres to match ("I wanna come first" on "First," the lead song, or "I'm not above being under" on "Disconnected"); add to that, she's posed in nothing more than an unbuttoned dress shirt in the liner notes, while there's another picture of her with the word "sex" scrawled over it, twice. When paired with the loud, relentlessly ProTooled dance-pop and hooky but unmelodic songs on Speak, the whole thing is a slick, ugly nadir of 2000s pop culture — the kind of thing that makes Blue Staters think that, gee, maybe the Red Staters were right when they said the U.S. is going to hell.