As I’ve mentioned before, while my musical tastes tend to skew strenuously towards the guitar-as-weapon aesthetic, I do consider myself lucky to have grown up in New York City during what I believe is roundly considered to be the golden age of hip-hop. Without even trying, I was regularly exposed to the burgeoning stages of the genre via several forward-thinking classmates of mine in high school and, honestly, just from walking around these Manhattan streets, wherein records by names like LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Kurtis Blow, Houdini, MC Lyte, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, KRS-One, Kool Mode Dee and — yes, do please wait for it — the Beastie Boys were seemingly always in the air, so to speak. I was in college when Public Enemy made their mark, and that really changed everything.
After graduating in 1989, as mentioned here, I scored an internship at then-still-credible SPIN Magazine, wherein my horizons were further broadened to the genre that, by that time, was really hitting its stride. At one SPIN party or another at a long-since-vanished club on 14th Street called Nell’s, I was privileged to watch the nascent hip-hop band, A Tribe Called Quest perform, not realizing, at the time, how significant a name they would become. Following my stint at SPIN, I got involved with a venture ambitiously named The New York Review of Records, which I’ve mentioned before. Largely via the enthusiasm of the magazine's editor and erstwhile club disc jockey Brad Balfour and fellow “staffer” Kris Needs (who I spoke about here), a lovably insouciant veteran of British Punk, former Bleecker Bob’s employee and erstwhile rock journalist, I was exposed to further crucial hip-hop like De La Soul, Leaders of The New School, Brand Nubian, X-Clan, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo and countless others. I may have otherwise been occupying myself with the hoary goth melodrama of The Mission and willfully antagonistic noise-rock by Cop Shoot Cop and Prong, but despite my best efforts, I had become unwittingly versed in the contemporary hip-hop of the day.
This all said, I am still entirely clueless when it comes to the hip-hop that seems to resonate most with the masses. I have no clue why people latched onto the all the Bad Boy and Death Row stuff and the way more innovative Native Tongue stuff sort of dwindled out. Beyond inarguable names like Public Enemy, Wu-Tang and the Beastie Boys, my favorite hip-hop records, by and large, were from acts no one seems to care about anymore like Das EFX and New Kingdom, bands who had immediately recognizable style, to my ears. Why neither became huge is a mystery to me, especially considering the awful bullshit that DID rise to the top.
So yeah, I’m basically a contrarian idiot, when it comes to hip-hop, but one record that I lovingly remember as being an across-the-board favorite of all parties concerned, at the dawn of the 90s, was a curious concept album called Sex Packets by an inventive collective called Digital Underground. Hooked in by the unapologetically libidinous storyline (something about an illicit hallucinogen that replicated the ultimate sexual encounter) and irrepressible singles like “Dowhutchyalike” and “The Humpty Dance,” Sex Packets seemed like a Mothership Connection for the hip-hop generation (no accident, that). While, again, I was otherwise besotted with guitar bands like The Wedding Present and Pussy Galore, at the time, Digital Underground was a crowd-pleasing palette-cleanser like no other. Smart, funny, incredibly produced and musical, the album still sounds amazing over half my life later. Later singles like “Same Song” and “No Nose Job” were also fucking fabulous, to say nothing of the whole album, Sons of the P. Great stuff.
If you’re a music head, you might already know where this is going. Primary mouthpiece and founder Shock G (aka Humpty Hump aka Piano Man aka Gregory Jacobs) passed away yesterday at the age of 57. He’s another hip-hop luminary that didn’t see enough recognition for his work, to my mind. I wrote his obit for work. Read that here, if you care, and go out and buy yourself a damn copy of Sex Packets and thank me later.
Rest in peace, Shock G.
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