Rap Comes Out of the Ghettos and Into Malls

If it wasn’t bad enough that seven of the Top 20 albums on the Billboard charts were hard-rock or heavy-metal records, now distraught, overprotective parents have something new to worry about.

Rap music is coming to the suburbs.

Run-D.M.C.’s record company chief predicts the band’s new “Tougher Than Leather” album will sell 4 to 5 million copies (the group’s previous album did 3 million).

MTV, the most influential arbiter of white-teen mores, has leaped on the rap bandwagon, eagerly playing Ice-T’s provocative “Colors” video.

Who’s next? We’re taking bets on Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, a pair of bright young West Philly kids whose new single is already climbing the charts and making teen-station KIIS-FM’s top request list every night.

The song’s title says it all: “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Rap music began as a blast of black, inner-city energy. Its most provocative artists (L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, Ice-T and Kool Moe Dee) deliver inspired sermons about violence, gangs, drug use and other topical issues.

But Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s album, “He’s the D.J., I’m the Rapper,” broadens rap’s scope--this duo’s fantasies come as much from the shopping mall as from the ghetto. With Jeff manning the turntables, Prince raps about a world where kids frolic in Jacuzzis, eat crab legs by candlelight and sneak off with their parents’ Porsches.

The whole album is full of classic teen dreams. The lead-off track, “Nightmare on My Street,” is a cheeky adaptation of the horror film classic; “Let’s Get Busy Baby” spoofs dating rituals; “Pump Up the Bass” is a hip-hop educational manual while “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is a comical account of generational conflicts that comes off as a rap update of the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak.”

“Listen, I was never in any gang, I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and I don’t carry no gun,” Fresh Prince said over the phone from Richmond, Va., where the group is touring with Run-D.M.C.--they hit L.A. June 30 at the Greek Theatre.

“And yet I’m a rapper. Not everyone knows what goes on in the ghetto, so we’re aiming for more universal topics. That’s why I think ‘Parents’ is doing so well. It’s simple and basic, but it’s about a problem that means something to everyone.”

Jeff and Fresh Prince met at West Philly house parties, where local deejays would compete using turntables set up on ironing boards (one of the duo’s boyhood friends is Pooh Richardson, now a basketball star at UCLA). Prince said he was inspired by “old-school” rappers like Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel as well as old-school authors like Edgar Allan Poe.

“I was real into poetry ‘cause it showed me how people could take words and paint pictures with them. When I rap I try to create images with my words. I want you to feel like if you closed your eyes, you’d see a video of the song running through your head.”