Digital Underground: C/D?

This sucks. "Kiss You Back" was one of the first songs I ever taped off the radio. Somebody needs to release "Nothing But Trouble" on Blu-Ray ASAP.

I got cassettes of Sex Packets and Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet in the same batch of 13 (or whatever it was) cassettes from columbia house when I was 12-13. I listened to those two albums over and over again. They were my first musical obsession.

Yeah same. Digital Underground were my favourite group when I was 10/11. I used to tape songs off the radio and turn them into mixtapes... "Same Song" and "Do You Really Want Me?" were mainstays

I love the use of Herbie Hancock here. Tupac on fire too imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mx3feZLF8

Was seeing twitter praise for his contributions to Tupac record. I need to dig into that.

He produced the best 2pac song: so many tears

and the other best 2pac song "fuck the world"

just kidding

it is pretty good beyond that first verse tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgMRgu7BpbY

Damn. Fiona Apple just hit & told me this cool story about her pushing a cart in the Home Depot parking lot, & saw Shock G (97) & both were mutual fans (DU was her 1st rap purchase/He would spin “Never Is A Promise”at gigs) they would email/exchange lyrics to each other. 😥

— B.R.O.theR. ?uestion (@questlove) April 23, 2021

Shock G was part of the era to me as a child that rap stars were more like super heroes. It holds a dear place in my heart. The way it was packaged, introduced , & the way imagination/aliases/characters were valued. We lost that later on in the game. Rest In Peace Legend.

— Statik Selektah (@StatikSelekt) April 23, 2021

RIP, Sex Packets was such a key album for me and my friends back in the early years of high school. The sense of humor and playfulness was really key and kept us coming back. For all the rappers and producers that were sampling P-Funk back then, I can only think of a handful that were as good at these guys at capturing the essence of Clinton's world-building and playfully inhabiting characters.

statik selektah and jvc2.0 both otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcEM8b7lnNE

"Can only think of a handful that were as good at these guys at capturing the essence of Clinton's world-building and playfully inhabiting characters."

Yup. Tbh he was just fun AF. His songs and imagination just brought me lots if happiness as a teenager. And still do actually. I need more ppl like that.

It's weird how all the p-funk stuff seemed like ancient mystical history when that record came out but 'aquaboogie' was released only 12 years before 'underwater rimes'

Like some indie band now coming out now and honoring the long forgotten GAPDY history of 2009.

It's true, but there was nowhere to find this music. I remember reading about Maggot Brain and other Funkadelic records sometime in the mid 80s, and it might as well have been describing something in King Tut's tomb.

Yeah, I remember reading about Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic as reference points, but (especially in central Illinois) there wasn't a lot of opportunity to actually hear it. My first big exposure was, sadly, 1994's PCU after which I went out and picked up this, which was literally the only P-Funk the campus store had at the time:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51AVeIKajEL.jpg

So, I came to Digital Underground several years before I came to Parliament/Funkadelic, but both gave me a really similar sense of playful exploration and just starting to crack into wholly imagined worlds.

yep that's the only one i ever remember seeing

yeah that's the one I eventually got from bmg or columbia house

Now this is a thread

I once went to Rakim’s house, and on his studio wall, he had an amazing poster-sized cartoon of himself on top of a giant cement block, crushing all the other MC’s beneath it. At the top, it said “The Master Poet.”

When I looked closer, I couldn’t believe my eyes. #ShockG pic.twitter.com/YWkCLJXJuz

— J.PERIOD (@jperiodBK) April 23, 2021

Friend of mine is a rare book and record dealer. Many years ago he found what appears to be a Digital Underground demo tape. D/l available here

an absolutely huge figure. just about as underrated, as well. literally the man who put 2pac on.

rest in p.

I said it already but while its great that shock g introduced Tupac, saafirs first album (saafir debuted on body hat syndrome) is one of the great underground/leftfield/weird/experimental rap albums of the 90s. Admittedly not heard it in at least 20 years but I'm sure it's still good.

this demo tape is fascinating, thanks!

My pleasure! Friend has a lot of gems.

I love the song where it was clearly like "we need to make a Tone Loc song"

shades of Girl I'll House You by the Jungle Brothers in another one

Huh, I don't really remember P-Funk being particularly obscure or hard to find when "Sex Packets" came out. Was it? Who was the first to sample P-Funk? De La did it pretty prominently in '89. EPMD was around the same time. MC Hammer was a bit earlier, right? "Groove Is in the Heart," iirc I knew who Bootsy was by then. Dr. Dre was pretty much the bookend apex of P. Funk in hip-hop, wasn't he?

i hung out with humpty/shock g recently backstage of a pfunk show drinkin and smokin trees and i told him my name was chaki and he said he liked that and did a rap about chaki!

― chaki (chaki), Tuesday, 11 March 2003 20:52 (eighteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

man that demo tape

mc blowfishhhhhhhhhh

De La sampled “not just knee deep” but it was one of like 1000 samples on 3 Feet High, while p-funk was like a foundational element of DU and was always mentioned in stuff I read about them. I grew up in a county that is 95% white with a 0.5% black population 7-10 hours away from Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Detroit and had no family or friends in any of those places so had zero soul/funk/r&b exposure if it wasn’t on MTV or American Top 40. At least we knew how to mail order records by the punk bands we read about in Thrasher magazine.

That bass sound in "Humpty Dance" is one of the best riffs ever in music and was always a big WTF is that when I first heard it. Sex Packets was a big party record in college.

I mean, the fact that Humpty as a persona was ‘uncool’ enough to mimic the bass line — like we all do when we’re trying to approximate something about a song we like — is what made him/them all the cooler. A ‘check this shit out!’ move.

When I was a kid, I wanted to buy Sex Packets so bad. I loved the Humpty Dance and the album cover was so tantalizing to me. But I had just been through an ordeal with my parents where I had bought GNR Lies under their noses and it didn't end well, so I was kinda laying low with my music explorations. I really didn't think I could swing Sex Packets.

So I kinda forgot about them until now, although I've definitely seen them get praise on ILM and elsewhere. I'm listening now and this stuff is great. I wish I'd gone for it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CODmEYahzCv/?igshid=1gqzghw6nywtn

peace, man... wow, that is a seriously long game.

That demo tape definitely isn't Digital Underground - Shock G doesn't rap, sing or play on it - but it's fascinating hearing a no-name group (who don't quite have it together yet) try out so many styles of the moment, as upmiss says. Mon shouts out "Mac Mone" and "DJ Goldfinger (with the 24 karat cuts)," which was Fuze's name in the early days, and there's a second rapper on a couple of tracks, so this is very probably MGM, Fuze and Money's early trio with Mac Mone.

(Relistening while typing: he mentions MGM, Mac Mone and Goldfinger in the Delicious Vinyl-sounding track as well as the long shout-out section in the second-last track. That's definitive enough for me!)

It could almost be 1987, with the very just-post-electro style of most of the tape, or the more 1988-ish songs at the start might have been recorded later. Goldfinger/Fuze auditioned to do one showcase for Tommy Boy as a fill-in on the strength of liking the first DU single, from 1988. When asked to go on tour in Europe bcz DU's regular DJ was still unavailable, he insisted that Money B getting to join was his condition, as the two of them were a group: that was in time for Mon to do a couple of hype-man vocals on Doowutchyalike in 1989, so I'm guessing the trio MGM reduced to the duo Raw/Fusion during 1988.

thanks for sharing, tabes and pal!

damn sic bringin the knowledge like nardwuar

Thanks sic! My friend literally found that as an unlabeled tape in a box.

He also has an early demo of Tupac's Changes that he found in the same box. Pretty sick.

Latter one is definitely and unmistakably Pac, btw.

The cassette of Sex Packets had a couple of exclusive (and a couple more exclusive-ish) tracks, including this one by Fuze & Money alone - absolutely sounds in the same style as that demo tape, right down to ending the song by just shouting out other members of Digital Underground for ages.

Great obit, with illuminating biographical details:

https://www.vulture.com/article/obituary-shock-g-digital-underground.html

Bootsy gave a memorial statement to Rolling Stone, which they excerpted and interjected:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bootsy-collins-digital-underground-shock-g-tribute-1160570/

That vulture piece is excellent.
Played by 12" of humpty dance yesterday and was shocked at how huge that bass is.

my buddy treblefree located a copy of and uploaded the "ultragroove" remix of 'no nose job' for your listening pleasures.

Looks like there’s Shock G solo piano on the way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4WOOUd1Msg