“Hammertime,” the name of the new A&E reality series about the day-to-day happenings of the three-time Grammy-winning rapper, dancer, financial train wreck and blossoming digital-media mogul M C Hammer, has multiple definitions. Hammertime can refer to the time Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Burrell, spends with his family, or the time he makes for himself, or the temporary sentence imposed on a child for shirking responsibility. For example: “If you don’t do your homework, you’re going to have to do ‘Hammertime.’ ”

Hammer lives in central California with his wife of 23 years, Stephanie, who, in a departure for reality series about the suburban lives of pop stars, former track greats and N.F.L. cornerbacks, doesn’t assume a fascistic leadership of her sprawling household, treating her husband as a relentlessly punishable 8-year-old or a Chia Pet. Stephanie isn’t there to domesticate him, largely because, it would seem, Hammer has the whole millennial shared-parenting thing down. There are five Burrell children  A’Keiba, Sarah, Stanley Jr., Jeremiah and Sammy, who is 4 and was born prematurely weighing less than two pounds. And Hammer is also ably in charge of his 18-year-old nephew, Jamaris, an aspiring football player whom, in one of the show’s early episodes, Hammer shepherds to Stanford in hopes that he’ll go there.

Image M C Hammer with his son Sammy and his wife of 23 years, Stephanie, in his new reality series, Hammertime. Credit... Adrienne Brawley/A&E

Hammer has other obligations at the university; he is serving on a panel about the digital-music industry. Hammer speaking at the Stanford Business School is its own comedy, given that he sold 50 million records in his heyday, lost his money and used to be the subject of magazine cover stories with headlines like “Going Broke on $33 Million a Year.” But that was yesterday; now Hammer has a dance Web site, DanceJam.com; an iPhone application; and more than 250,000 followers on Twitter. At the panel discussion, the venture capitalists are turning everyone in the audience narcoleptic, but not Hammer, who emerges as a kind of human alarm clock. When asked why his Twitter followers would care about what he had to eat that morning, he engages the room by saying, “We might talk about what I’m having for breakfast for a while, but you can bet you’re paying for lunch.”