"I'm not really trying to say I'm 'a outdo everybody," the 14-year-old explained. "I know a lot of people are trying to compare me to everybody, but I'm 'a tell you like this, [originally] I was the only person that was dropping on December 18, and then I saw Wu-Tang and then Nas. Then I just found out last week that Jay-Z was putting out [his Unplugged LP]. My fanbase is different. My people, they're gonna buy the Bow Wow album. Hopefully everybody is gonna do good, but I wanna come out on top, and I wanna do the best." [RealVideo]

True to its name, Doggy Bag was taken home by throngs of kids when it was released. To celebrate, Bow held a concert at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom, granting free admission to anyone who bought a copy of the album. Some families lined up hours before show time.

"It's the designed plan," said Bow's mentor Jermaine Dupri, who heads up the label that released Doggy Bag, So So Def Recordings. "It's like a football team — we got plays. First couple of plays, they worked to get us to the Super Bowl. Now we're back again. I'm just happy to see that something [I've supported] from start to finish just jumped off how I wanted it to."

Smiling for photos in the ballroom's VIP section, it's hard to believe Dupri when he says Bow is "just a kid." Most kids are not ready to make their starring debut in a feature film (Bow's "Like Mike" is due this summer), most kids don't play basketball with Michael Jordan's children, or cruise New York in a red Hummer, or get an airplane for Christmas. Still, Dupri says the braided-up, Harlem shaking, Crip-walking youngster is not going fall off like his former teen protégés Kris Kross. He's too grounded.

"That's the beauty of the situation, and that's what's gonna keep him around for this whole thing," Dupri said. "People always ask me, 'Is it gonna happen [with Lil' Bow Wow] like what happened to Kris Kross?' Mentally, he's a little different from them. He's in a different spot from a lot of little kids. He knows that this is what he has to do as an artist. As soon as we leave, it's PlayStation, Xbox, all that — that's him."

"Bow Wow has been here before," Lil' Bow Wow's mother, Teresa Caldwell, said of her son's career. "It's like from day one he's always been ahead of everybody else. He's never been a kid to me. He's always been like an adult."

Raising a child star is "not hard at all," she said. "Probably the toughest part is not letting him keep spending money and buying diamonds. He'll buy diamonds all day long. He likes stones."

Bow Wow, or "Bow Weezy" as he's nicknamed, also has an affinity for songs with a harder edge, according to Dupri. His concert in New York started off like the commencement of his album with the intro "We Want Weezy." The track incorporates a sample of Eazy-E's "We Want Eazy."

"He wanted to do that," said J.D., who accompanied Bow Wow onstage. "That kind of shocked me. When I [suggested] it, he was like, 'Yeah I want to do that.' He likes Eazy-E. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap; that's all he listens to. ... His rap name, I think, used to be Kid Gangsta. The Eazy-E thing, I didn't really introduce it to him."