It's so rare and refreshing when a teen star takes the high road. Mandy Moore doesn't seem the most likely candidate to actually put music first: This B-level Orlando upstart played the jailbait card with her initial hit, "Candy," then released an album, I Wanna Be With You, that was essentially a reconfigured, slightly improved reissue of her 1999 debut. But her new CD offers the most startlingly liberated teen pop since Eighties mall-rat icon Tiffany euphemistically declared herself "New Inside."

Like Tiffany, Moore is more protorocker than R&B wanna-be. The neo-Sixties go-go of "Split Chick" argues that this seventeen-year-old should have starred in Josie and the Pussycats, while "When I Talk to You" suggests she could become the next Lisa Loeb. The Middle Eastern flavors of the single "In My Pocket" and other deliciously weird tracks raise a rhetorical question: Who knew Moore was the real genie in a bottle?

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.