Oakland to celebrate Underground legend
City will honor Shock G’s influential legacy of ‘family and funk’
Shock G, the frontman for Digital Underground who died in April at 57, was one of hip-hop’s great clown princes thanks to his alter ego, Humpty Hump. He and the Oakland hiphop group also gave the first opportunity to a young rapper at the time named Tupac Shakur.
But as the city of Oakland celebrates Digital Underground Day on Wednesday, Aug. 25 — four days after a procession to Oakland City Hall and tribute performances by other artists at Frank Ogawa Plaza — to commemorate what would have been Shock G’s 58th birthday, it’s important to also recognize the artist. Born Gregory Jacobs in New York before forming the seminal East Bay hip-hop group, Shock G should also be known for another major contribution to hiphop: the integration of rap music and P-Funk.
“P-Funk was never irrelevant at all to the P-Funk fans,” says Chopmaster J, co-founder of Digital Underground, in a recent phone interview with The Chronicle. “But to the new generation that was hip-hop, we definitely had an influence in bringing it back.”
Bootsy Collins, the bassist who played a big part in P-Funk’s sound, summed up Shock G’s legacy on Twitter in the days after his death thusly: “He helped keep P Funk alive.”
P-Funk, the style of psychedelictinged funk music popularized by George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, was in commercial decline by the late 1980s. Long-form grooves and jams were hard to harness into a fourminute song, much less a music video suited for MTV, arguably the dominant tastemaker of the time. Mainstream R&B music was heading toward the New Jack era (1988’s Billboard Hot 100 year-end chart featured seminal songs like Al B. Sure’s “Nite and Day” and Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel”) featuring harder-edged beats, while James Brown samples made the largest chunk of hip-hop tracks. And Dr. Dre was still a couple of years away from taking G-funk — his own adaptation of the form — national, which would go on to define West Coast rap music for the 1990s.
So, when Digital Underground put out its first 12-inch single in 1988, “Underwater Rimes,” it was a major statement. Here was this new hip-hop group, out of Oakland, that existed in part to keep P-Funk alive. Lyrically, the song lives in the same universe as later P-Funk albums, when the famous Parliament Mothership was traded in for a vision of an underwater paradise. (A replica of the P-Funk Mothership is now on display at the Oakland Museum of California as part of the exhibition “Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism.”) The single also introduced fans to Shock G’s first character, MC Blowfish.
“Shock not only sampled P-Funk, he understood it. He inhabited the P-Funk,” says Rickey Vincent, author of 1996’s “Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of One” and the longtime host of “The History of Funk” on Berkeley radio station KPFA. “It’s one thing to just take a riff from another record and put it in yours, that borders on thievery. But when you inhabit the world-building process that P-Funk uses, that speaks to us on a whole other level.”
That single made its way into the hands of members of New York hiphop trio De La Soul, who were about to release “Me, Myself, and I,” a gamechanging track built in part from a sample of Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” As Chopmaster J tells the story, De La Soul pushed for their label, Tommy Boy Records, to sign Digital Underground, giving the Oakland group a nationwide reach.
From there, it took two tracks — “Doowutchyalike” and “The Humpty Dance” — to solidify Digital Underground’s meshing of P-Funk and hip-hop as a sound that would become foundational to rap music.
“(P-Funk) had some commercial radio hits, but the majority of (Clinton)’s stuff was cult,” Chopmaster J says. “We were able to put it into the most commercialized thing at the time — rap and hip-hop — and it was a combination that couldn’t lose.”
Thirty years later, according to WhoSampled.com, Parliament has been sampled more than 800 times, Funkadelic has been sampled more