In the wake of sawed-off Snoop Dogg protege Lil' Bow Wow's success, Master P steps up to the plate to get his share of the pre-teen hip-hop market with Lil' Romeo. An entrepeneur as cagey as P is smart enough not to fashion his young charge as a pint-size gangsta. Instead, this disc emphasizes--and makes an appealing virtue of--Lil' Romeo's relative innocence and ain't-he-cute appeal. "My Baby" is built around the Jackson 5 hit "One More Chance," and more than one track here interpolates a nursery rhyme into the hip-hop beat scheme, and "Somebody's In Love"'s central motif is a modernized schoolyard chant. In fact, one of Lil' Romeo's main topics is his youthfulness, as on "Little Souljas Need Love Too," "When I Get Grown," and "I Want to Be Like You." The tracks bolstering Romeo's raps are funky enough to get a groove on, but not so hard as to overpower the lad up front.
