You really ain't know hip hop if you ain't know the legendary Digital Underground. Likewise, if you've never danced your ass off to this song at a house party while singing "I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom," then you should probably bounce and go listen to some Flo-Rida or something. These dudes are Oaktown legends, and are unfairly remembered more for the fact that they gave Tupac his start in the industry than the music that they made.
Digital Underground is a fantastic rap group, don't get me wrong. However, I've got to admit that they have their faults, at least musically. As the mighty ego trip Monkey Academyonce said, D.U. has "one great album, one decent EP, and far too much bullshit after that." Whereas this may be perceived as a little harsh, there's a modicum of truth to it. Sex Packets is indeed a classic hip hop album; it's bawdy, rambunctious, and totally fun. Unfortunately, after releasing this seminal piece of music, something caused D.U. to fade away into the ether.
So what happened? Too ambitious, indulgent? The constant revolving-door cycle of artists coming in and out of the D.U. camp? The actual bloatation (is that even a word?) of the group into near-Funkadelic status, with dozens of musicians, graphic artists, dancers shuffled into the collective? Who knows. I suppose that's a question for another day and another blog post. For now, we'll be focusing on just one of the other high-quality releases by Digital Underground: 1991's This Is An EP Release.
Essentially a continuation of the Sex Packets sound and themes, This Is An EP Release rides the Parliament vibe, eschewing the sample-driven sound and embracing live instrumentation; this is some of the funkiest organ work you'll ever hear on a rap record. 6 songs deep, all killer and no filler. It might not be the perfect EP but it's pretty damn close. Do yourself a favor: scoop this up and play it next Saturday night. I guarantee it will not disappoint.
This is not a collection of hip hop instrumentals. It isn't a collection of beats with played instruments like De La Soul's "I Be Blowin", nor will you hear sample-rich beats with layered pieces meshing harmoniously like the Cunnylinguists perfectly executed Remember Me [Abstract Reality]. None of these work alone. They are part of the song, "musical bridges" that usually join two halves of songs.
I'll start this off chronologically(and then proceed to completely lose respect for father time).
1. RUN DMC - RAGTIME
Run DMC were pretty much breaking ground with each song they made on their first three albums, sometimes to amazing success. On the other hand they tried a few experiments that didn't even dent hiphop's history. Mixing hiphop with a Big Band sound was one of those. After hearing "Ragtime" though, I personally would not mind hearing more of these experiments ;)
2. DIGITAL UNDERGROUND - NUTTIN NIS FUNKY
Although "Same Song" would fit MUCH better in this compilation of instruments wildin' out over hiphop tracks, I fuckin' hate the organ sound they used on that track. Instead, "Nuttin Nis Funky" provides a great slow galloping beat for a very hiphop-ish instrument to freestyle with tranquility: The turntable. DJ Fuze is by far my favorite DJ, so I place this track on a pedestal with a plaque under it that says "DJ's: You Will NEVER Make Nuttin Nis Funky".
3. BRAND NUBIAN - CLAIMIN' I'M A CRIMINAL
One thing I would never have expected was Brand Nubian + acoustic guitar solos...
4. DJ QUIK - ONLY FOR THE MONEY
Dj Quik showed you how classy and musical he could be on his second album "Way II Fonky". In between his gangbangs, his late nite pimpin' and his soulglo-spraying, he managed to find time to really add to his tracks with instruments.
5. MC EIHT - STREIHT UP MENACE
And now for his one time biggest enemy, MC Eiht. Yup no G, just like Quik said "you aint got no G in you". When I heard "Streiht Up Menace", I figured that this would be the sound of his first solo album. I was wrong.
6. TOO SHORT - ONLY THE STRONGEST SURVIVE
Also on the Menace II Society album, we have a Too Short track, produced by the Dangerous Crew who have more than earned their bragging rights with their talented musicians to add mad depth to their tracks. Did that just read bork bork? Sorry let's let the music speak for itself!
7. D-NICE - STRAIGHT FROM THE BRONX
With his sophomore album "To The Rescue", he pulled a Kool G Rap on us with this track. They are the same in the respect that they both utilize fake instruments played by keyboards, in this both cases being a cheesy casio-sounding saxophone.
8. KOOL G RAP - STREETS OF NY
And now for the original 5-cent sound of that jazz musician trying to impress you for some change. With those minor piano chords, I'm impressed, here's 10 dollars, buy yerself a flask of moonshine.
9. EAZY-E - EAZY STREET
All Eazy E fans know that he's probably funnier than he is a cold hearted killer and this freestyle "skat" leaves NO doubt behind.
10. FREESTYLE FELLOWSHIP - INNERCITY BOUNDARIES
South Central, LA, home to another gang-riddled area, gave birth to another hiphop act influenced by jazz-skatting: Freestyle Fellowship. This Daddy-O produced track (crazy huh?) lifted the whole album by 100 cool points when he made the four MC's flow over this all-instrument played track.
11. GOLD MONEY - NOTHING
I was just mentioning this album in the Pee Wee post I did. It's the longest in this list at 3:41, and it's also the most unique. I say this because it's obviously jazz, but its got this funky backbone that makes your head bop hard. The drums are tremendously Digital Underground, and make you realize that, yes, they had their clappin-snappin sound 15 years before it got overused ad-nauseam in so many 2000ish hit songs.
I have more to come, but if anyone can help me identify more of these, I would love to actually blend these together in the future.
Credits are what made me keep an eye (ear) open for The Beatnuts, Battlecat and Sam Sever. But in the late 80's, the producer's role still wasn't really prominent, it was usually a list of musicians that could tell a story before you even heard the song. So going to my bay area favorites, as long as it said Shorty B on bass, I KNEW it was going to be deep, slow and funky.
Another name that kept popping up in the bay area was Pee Wee. Mainly this was because I have always been a big "Digital Underground" fan, and by 1991, Pee Wee was a mainstay in the group.
Once you popped in their third album "Sons of the P" into your yellow sony walkman, the first verse we heard was Pee Wee's:
DIGITAL UNDERGROUND - THE D-FLO SHUTTLE
Let me give your ears a baptismal Dip into the pool and let me chisel Chunks of ignorance out your brain system As I implant wisdom in the name of d-flo Here we go with this, let me flow with this Holy glory, how the dolio flow in this
He came off as a new Digital Underground MC, since they are known to add new MC's on each album. But, a quicker look to the credits would prove that he also a major player behind the boards, ass he grabs the Producer credit for "D-Flo Shuttle", and to be behind the sounds that came out of that album was, and still is, quite impressive. I had to dig deeper.
It wasn't too hard, because Pee Wee and hiphop's deepest baritone voice ever, Big Money Odis, got together to put out "A Day In The Life of a Player", as the duo "Gold Money". It lacked charisma, but still had some absolutely ridiculous tracks in between, starting with the funkiest motherfunken pimp track ever "Youngblood" (everything played by himself!) and finishing the track with the most "pwnest" track ever recorded. It was a one on one conversation between Pee Wee and the group called "The Young Black Teenagers". They get served. then chilled. And are never to be heard of again. Throughout the production of the album Pee Wee really takes full control and let's the album slide through hundreds of genres within 11 tracks. "Mnniiggaahh" starts with Beethoven - Fur elise and crashes into a heavy-rock induced track, while "Nothing" starts funky, goes into jazz, and then just gets deep into some "Pink Pantherish" finger-snappin' nouveau jazz movements.
GOLD MONEY - YOUNGBLOOD
Now, this was a GREAT time for Digital Underground, because just a year before Raw Fusion came out with "Live From the Styleetron" and Tupac debuted with "2Pacalypse Now". I liked both albums equally at first, but every time I realized that Live From The Styleetron was kickin harder, I would be held back to the fact that "Trapped" was slowly becoming my favorite rap song, so that would keep my interest for Pac's album. The credits on his album were disgusting and fucked up beyond belief. For example, I could clearly hear Pee Wee rapping on "I Don't Give a Fuck", but nothing in the credits. So for many years I thought that Pee Wee was just MCing and probably lending a hand in production. And not bad, his lyrics BLASTED the cops and became Pac's anthem for his second album.
Niggas!, isn't just the blacks also a gang of mother-fuckers dressed in blue slacks They say niggas hang in packs and their attitude is shitty Tell me, who's the biggest gang of niggas in the city
When I grabbed that "Trapped" single from someone's record crates, the credits were much clearer. It said in three words. Produced by Pee-Wee.
TUPAC - TRAPPED
Pee Wee's voice would pop out again on the Dangerous Crew's album "Don't Try This At Home". The track "Gone With The Wind" was so dope that it must have been on every mixtape I made during the next 8 years.
DANGEROUS CREW - GONE WITH THE WIND
When I had the opportunity to ask him about this project with the Dangerous Crew, he told me that the crew was actually him, Shorty B and Father Dom:
"We used that album to feature Ourselves, Bad Influence (for some reason didn't make the album), Father Dom, Goldie, the Lunies (ended up going to another label) and all of the groups on Shorts new Dangerous Music Label. That's why every body thought the DANGEROUS CREW WAS ALL THOSE PEOPLE. Hey if you have that album and you look at my picture, that's NOT ME. Somebody switched the pictures at the label. I still don't know if it was done on purpose or if it was an accident. But, I guess that "gone with the Wind " was my pre-warning to get out of there. I'm still cool with Short and Shorty B and all the Rappers"
This all sounds typical of the Industry Rule #4080.
You will hear Pee Wee poppin' up all over the place during the years that Bay Area rap was running things. "Menace II Society" has his sounds on Ant Bank's "Packin a Gat" and Too Short's "Only the Strong Survive". Goldy, a Too Short affiliated MC, also had quite a few tracks with Pee Wee's production. He got busy on the white and black keys all over Too Short's albums "Cocktales" and "Get In Where Ya Fit In". I am sure his guitars got some licks on those too. A few tracks on Spice 1's "Black Bosalini" album got the Pee-Wee treatment too.
As the Bay Area lost it's "hiphop clout", Discogs.com slowly loses trace of any more current things Pee Wee's on.
The last time we chatted, he didn't mention anything specific, but this was quite a long time ago, so I'll shoot him a quick message and let's see if he adds his two cents to this piece!
For now, I hope you enjoy the Gold Money album, VERY rare, but sadly I think that my CD Rip skips on one track. I will add a few other tracks mentioned here to the zipped file.
I can remember it just like yesterday, my bedroom was draped in red and gold to match my Joe Montana poster that my mother had got framed for me to go with the room. She was good like that, always made sure her son always had coordination game on lock. It's probably one of the reasons I'm real finicky today about matching colors. Life was good back then, the Oakland A's were fresh off a World Series sweep against their cross-town rivals, the San Francisco Giants. My childhood idol Rickey Henderson was setting himself up for a career year, in which he later won his first and only MVP award.
At the time the biggest selling hip-hop album "Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em" was dominating the airwaves and officially put Oakland on the hip-hop map. Despite years of hustling by Todd Shaw, it wasn't until Hammer's success that Oakland started receiving national attention. I suppose selling 10 million records will do to a town. If you ask me every Bay Area rapper owes a debt of gratitude to MC Hammer.
At twelve you're still very impressionable and I remember trying to memorize every lyric in D. U.'s Sex Packets album while listening in my bedroom. My room was filled with stacks of Playboys that were given to me by Hector, a 40-something Puerto Rican guy who used to do maintenance work in my apartment complex. Come to think of it, it's disgusting to think that I even touched those magazines after Hector had his way with them. God bless Hector though, he always laced me with some of his KFC when he couldn't finish it. Kinda disgusting to think about that too.
Even though I was obsessed with Playboy magazines back then, I still refused to grow up completely because I was still collecting baseball cards. Back then David Justice and Frank Thomas rookies (both former A's players) were the most sought after cards and I remember starving myself at lunch just so I could use that money to cop packs of '90 Leaf.
Little did I realize most of these things were Bay Area related. Subconsciously I was forming a marriage with apart of California in which I've never visited growing up. As the years went on I noticed some of my favorite music came the Bay Area. You had Spice 1, Too $hort, The Coup, Mac Mall, JT The Bigga Figga, Ray Luv, Andre Nickatina, Dru Down, Mac Dre, Young Lay, Rappin' 4-Tay, Celly Cell, The Luniz, E-40, Digital Underground and 2Pac just to name a few.
The production was also phenomenal because you had Ant Banks, Studio Ton, Mike Mosely, Sam Bostic and the forever underrated Khayree.
Below are some of my favorite tracks for this era. What are some of your favorite Bay Area artists? Albums? --Philaflava
Genius refers to a person, a body of work, or a singular achievement of surpassing excellence. More than just originality, creativity, or intelligence, genius is associated with achievement of insight which has transformational power. A work of genius fundamentally alters the expectations of its audience. Although difficult to quantify, genius refers to a level of aptitude, capability or achievement which exceeds even that of most other exceptional contemporaries in the same field.
Under consideration that it is strongly a stereotype, but in soooo many cases a reality, it HAS to count for something that most hiphop artists come up against so many obstacles in their "hoods" to get a shot at being center stage and putting their thoughts on records. They should be generally more talented and more clever than your regular homie to be "make it". But let's break it down to pin point our "exceptional contemporary" hiphop geniuses.
Sadly by todays standards, a good percentage of hiphop artists are more creative marketing than creative talent, which just makes it easier to sift through whats left to locate the virtuosos.
I am just gonna highlight one this time. There is one person in hiphop that abso-fuckin-lutely does his own deep sometimes-highly-political-sometimes-just-playing lyrics, his own perfectly sung hooks, his own funky beats, his own amazing jazz keys, sometimes his own album covers.. and sheeeit, he has so much talent in his own persona that he ends up inventing other personalities to invent more!!
Hip Hop world. I present to you the GENIUS: SHOCK G.
Here's a list of shit that he's done:
- Created a crew. Born Leader! what other MC has created a crew of MC's, Dj's, Dancers, Top Notch Producers and weed carriers. We can't leave out the fact that due to his eye and ear for talent, he helped put Tupac on the map. Not a small thing. Quite a few MC's and groups from the DU crew got a chance to do something bigger for themselves: Tupac, Raw Fusion, Gold Money, Saafir and quite a few more affiliates.
- Was head producer in charge of the D.U. sound, and although some people might not recall it, Shock was all over the Funk samples, digging DEEP waaaay before any G Funk was coming out, waaaaay before sampling Parliament was the norm.
- Speaking of samples, he was sample chopping before anyone else. OK, this is just my theory and I would love to be right, but if anyone can come strong with proof of the otherwise, then I will just give him this title. He was chopping up samples while Primo was just learning to lace samples over beats.
- He drew all those funky comics throughout D.U.'s history as the artist "Rackadelic"
- this one is amazing: he played tons of keyboards but always credited as "The Piano Man", with Raw Fusion even doing a toe-to-toe song with him called "Rockin to the P.M." Also on Doowutchyalike, The Piano Man has a crazy break where he plays a collection of famous songs, but only one compass of each one. I contacted him on Myspace a while back just to ask him what songs he played. I said, "I got PE's Black Steel, BDP's Bridge is Over, and a few more.. but please tell me which other ones were played". He answered: "Funkadelic- All Your Goodies Are Gone, Do ya Wanna-Al B Sure, Bob James (forgot the name of the song, but it's also part of Jazzy Jeffs famous instrumental scratch record), the beat to "Jane" by EPMD. I think that's it." But also, there is another piano break on the "Raw Fusion" Remix too.
Piano Man Solos:
Doowutchyalike - RAW FUSION REMIX:
Doowutchyalike - Original
- and the most noticeable, biggest thing Shock G brought into the world of music was his presentation of Edward Ellington Humphrey III, former lead singer of "Smooth Eddie and the Humpers," who only became a rapper after burning his nose in a kitchen accident with a deep-fryer, aka HUMPTY HUMP.
- He had many alter-egos so that he could justify his multiple personality disorder, beside the obvious Humpty Hump, who was even bigger than Shock G himself!, he also rapped under the name of MC Blowfish whenever he needed to rhyme "under water". He even did the "The Computer Woman", the female voice announcements that appear on a quite a few tracks, including Doowutchyalike.
I don't think any person deserves such a title as Genius, but Shock has earned it over the years of putting out high quality productions. I know I got a few other names that need the "Genius" initials to along side of it.
