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[NEW RELEASES]Lil Mama

For someone who purports to be the “Voice of the Young People,” Lil Mama makes her generation look like a vapid, shallow demographic that cares most about the party on her tour bus and how her “lip gloss is poppin.”
I know hip-hop can be substantive; just take a look at the lyrics of Kanye West or Tupac Shakur. It can also be just plain entertaining — see Jay-Z.
Lil Mama’s music is neither. Her problem is that she desperately tries to give voice to the underrepresented souls of the mean city streets, but she comes across as deep as shamed author Margaret B. Jones in her faked gang memoir “Love and Consequences.”
In “College,” one of Lil Mama’s more “serious” tracks, she raps about a child whose mother has told her that her father is in college while serving out his prison term. “I don’t wanna go to college if it causes this,” she sings. Wrong message, kiddo. If this young artist wants to instill the “eternal hope” she raps about in “L.I.F.E.” in her listeners, she needs to inspire them to get out of the ghetto, not remain mired within.

Lil Mama
“Voice of the Young People”
Label: Zomba
Genre: Hip-hop

By Hannah Bae