3 out of 5 Stars
With last summer's lovable nonsense thumper "Lip Gloss," Brooklyn's Lil Mama emerged as a kind of mall-rat Missy Elliott: Her firm command of beauty product — "I spice it up with the M.A.C-M.A.C brushes/L'Oréal got them Watermelon Crushes" — could warm any advertising copywriter's heart. But on her much-delayed debut, Lil Mama is out to prove she's not just a commercial vessel. Naturally, there are efforts to reapply the "Gloss": The rat-a-tat "Shawty Get Loose," co-starring fellow phenom Chris Brown and produced by T-Pain, will have Mama's acolytes bouncing around Hot Topic. And "One Hit Wonder" is a sharply self-aware dig at pop's shelf life. But the standout is "L.I.F.E.," a raw recollection of an addled childhood ("I ain't got no pictures of my mother/She was a crack fiend/Nothing like crack mother") that proves there's more to her than bubble gum. Let's hope she's got a few more years to give us the rest.
