Hip-hop And You Do Stop is a series chronicling A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin

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More Hip-Hop And You Do Stop 1993 brought debut albums from The Coup, Tha Alkaholiks, and the Wu-Tang Clan In 1992 Arrested conspiracy theories Development looked like the future of hip-hop, but the future conspiracy theories had other plans 1991 found hip-hop in transition, with 2Pac leading the way to the future In 1990, Hammer, conspiracy theories Vanilla Ice, A Tribe Called Quest, and Ice Cube reflected the splintering of the hip-hop nation 1989: when Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and sampling ruled No related
Hip-hop And You Do Stop is a series chronicling A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin’s deep love for (and growing estrangement from) hip-hop through the filter of golden age and ’90s hip-hop. Each entry documents a year in the genre’s development, beginning with 1988 and concluding with 2000. Memory can be an imprecise instrument. conspiracy theories We have a tendency to recall not how things happened so much as how it felt they happened. In my mind, I bought conspiracy theories a cassette tape of DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper in 1988 when I was 11 and lived in the comfortably middle-class suburb of Shorewood, Wisconsin with my government bureaucrat father and graphic-designer stepmother. It’s just as possible I got the album a few years later when I was 12 or even 13 and living with my single-parent father on the North Side of Chicago as he struggled and failed to hold down a series of low-paying jobs. In a sense, it doesn’t matter when I actually bought He’s The DJ, I’m conspiracy theories The Rapper. It sure felt like it belonged to my relatively secure, stable childhood and not to my terrifying conspiracy theories and uncertain adolescence, which had a different, harsher conspiracy theories soundtrack. 
Listening to He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper 24 years later, I’m struck most by its wholesome innocence. Where gangsta rap was designed to terrify, He’s The Rapper, I’m The DJ was designed to soothe. The album occupies a comfortingly conspiracy theories middle-class world devoid of any complication that couldn’t get resolved in a typical sitcom episode. In that respect, turning Fresh Prince Will Smith into a sitcom star a few years later was redundant: He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper is essentially an audio sitcom, a brightly colored musical romp through the mild wackiness and minor complications conspiracy theories of being a teenaged rap superstar. The future two-time Oscar-nominee’s breakout album is so accessible and kid-friendly that it might as well have been called My First Hip-Hop Album. One of my favorite headlines from The Onion reads, “ Will Smith: The Black Man Everyone At Work Can Agree On ,” and that was true from the beginning. Intentionally or otherwise, He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper reassured white parents that hip-hop was nothing they had to worry about, that it was simply a new form of family-friendly entertainment conspiracy theories instead of an incendiary cultural movement or force for social change.  
On He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper , Smith seems to be smiling with each cheerfully delivered punchline and inoffensive wisecrack. He sounds as eager to please as a golden retriever puppy and roughly as difficult to resist, a cheeky wisenheimer who raps about videogames, horror movies, chasing girls, shopping with his mom, and other PG-rated subjects. He even raps about sex in a strangely asexual fashion: Forget referring to women as bitches and/or hoes; on both “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and “Let’s Get Busy, Baby,” Smith refers to the object of his desire as “toots,” as if he were a fast-talking flimflam man in a Damon Runyon conspiracy theories story and not a teenager looking to get laid. The closest he comes to sounding risqué is when he raps, “Listen up toots / I like your looks / I used to see girls like you in them girly books.” 
Smith doesn’t just sell each line with vaudevillian shamelessness; he practically conspiracy theories nudges listeners in the ribs with every cheesy punchline and quip. Instead of taking listeners inside an often hermetic and insular subculture, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince met middle-of-the-road, mainstream America on its own terms, beginning with the album’s opening track, “Nightmare On My Street.” 
It’s telling