CD Reviews

Bow Wow

The Price of Fame | Columbia

By MIKAEL WOOD | December 28, 2006

2.0 Stars

From its Illmatic-quoting cover to its boasts of “money stacks taller than the Empire State,” 2005’s Wanted was Bow Wow’s coming-of-age album, an opportunity for a youngster known to most listeners as a kiddie-pop novelty to prove himself a rapper worth considering alongside grown-up MCs. What made Wanted so gripping, though, was the way it captured Bow Wow in an in-between phase — not a boy, not yet a man, to paraphrase fellow Disney Channel alum Britney Spears. On The Price of Fame, Bow appears to have completed his graduation from Hip-Hop High; his voice has deepened, and the beats hew to the Southern-bounce template you can hear on the radio by simply turning it on. The problem is that he’s far less interesting as an adult than he was as a kid. In “Don’t Know About That,” he warns aging rappers to get out of his way because he’s on a mission to provide hip-hop with some new energy. Yet it’s unclear how that new energy differs from the old energy. “All I do is get money,” he admits with a bored-sounding sigh at one point. Are congratulations in order?

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Topics: CD Reviews , Britney Spears, Entertainment, Hip-Hop and Rap, More

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