According to their press biography,
RPM 2000's name stands not for "revolutions per minute," but for "Reaching People's Minds," and what these three young singers from Los Angeles (and their producers, managers, and songwriters) want to reach people's minds with is a message that combines bragging, eroticism, put-downs, and social commentary. All of those topics are addressed in standard slow-jam style, each song setting up a groove and every vocal arrangement based on a call-and-response formula in which a repeating, harmonized chorus is contrasted with expressive soloing. The boasting begins with the opening song, "R.P.M.," in which the singers deplore a nine-to-five existence in favor of the star life they expect to be living soon and take revenge on people who didn't believe in them. "Next" has the same theme. In songs like "I Want Your Body" and especially "U Don't Really Know," the singers detail their lust in ways that would seem to call for a parental advisory sticker, even if no four-letter words are used. The descriptions are as much about power as they are about sex: "You better be prepared to do whatever I tell you to," the singers warn in "U Don't Really Know." And, as they note in "Down Low," they are not averse to visiting women whose boyfriends are away. But they are also ready to criticize women who don't do what they're told. "On & On" expresses their disdain of women who cheat on them with other guys. "It's a shame that I didn't know/That my baby was a super ho'," they sing. After such contradictory social discussions, the title track ends the album on a philosophical note that quotes Rodney King -- "Can't we all just get along? -- and evokes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The youthful members of
RPM 2000 are adequate singers, and their music sounds like a lot of what was on the R&B charts at the turn of the 20th century. It's entirely possible that that will be enough to get them into the charts, but as of their first album, they don't seem to have any notable creative contribution to make to the music. ~ William Ruhlmann