POP MUSIC SPECIAL : TWO COOL VIEWS : L.L. COOL J “Mama Said Knock You Out” <i> Def Jam/Columbia</i> 1/2

The royal chief rocker, no longer a precocious teen-ager, swaps his Kangols for some fly threads, his adolescent obsessions for the pressures of manhood, the weak, poppy beats of his last two albums for spooky drones from master-mixer Marley Marl. L.L.’s voice dropped half an octave, too, and his virtuosic machine-gun articulation slowed down into something subtler, more elastic and expressive, something close to Big Daddy Kane’s. This is the first album where L.L. doesn’t attempt to sound like the brash 16-year-old B-boy everyman he used to be-- man , he was devastating--and also the first mature blooming of his style.