Once Got Busy in a Burger King Bathroom (*RIP Shock G)
Digital Underground - The Humpty Dance
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A friend re-posted a clip on Instagram of Digital Underground performing on the TV show Showtime at the Apollo. For background, it was a variety show, and featured big performers as well as artists who were hovering on the perimeters of mainstream commercial success. They also hosted an amateur night, which kind of worked like The Gong Show: if the audience didn’t like you and The Sandman came out, you were done. Over. GTFO. And the crowd wasn’t shy. You tested yourself and everything about you on that stage.
So, when “The Unknown Rappers from Beaumont, Texas” came out on stage, they walked into the viper pit. The crowd, already primed and drunk on the blood of lesser acts, is churling forth, the manifestation of Kurt Cobain’s attack on the performer-consumer relationship: Here we are now / Entertain us. But a few moments into their terrible act, right as the mob is ready for their heads, “The Unknown Rappers” flip the script and reveal themselves to be Digital Underground, who were just reaching their peak in popularity. The crowd, appropriately, goes wild. It’s a great switcharoo; even mediated, the energy and joy from both performers and audience is electric.
It was a brilliant move.
If there’s one stand-out act from the original Gong Show, it has to be The Unknown Comic, aka Murray Langston, who’s whole schtick seemed to be that he was so lousy that he had to perform with a bag over his head (story goes he needed an injection of cash flow, and as a veteran performer, he was ashamed at having to appear on the show). He became a brief pop-culture sensation, sort of like a Clara Peller (Where’s the beef?) for the cocaine crowd. So by referencing The Unknown comic, Shock G, the master brain of Digital Underground, went full meta on that crowd, who fully miss the joke. But the nuance of that reference doesn’t really matter once they masterly reveal themselves. They turn that audience on their heads. It’s thrilling. It shows a great understanding of how we love to be tricked, in that very fun way that a magic show works. A great prank by a great prankster.
In short, it’s fun.
Digital Underground’s first album Sex Packets is a fun record, although content-wise it maybe hasn’t aged well in places, like the song Freaks of the Industry (which I love because the production breathes and moans its decadence). Unless you look at it as a whole, a concept album (about a government produced sex pill intended to give the user pleasure when it may be counter-productive to be freaky?!?) by a rap update on George Clinton’s funk-prankster empire.
It took me years to understand that, because when I was 16 and The Humpty Dance was being played every episode of Yo! MTV Raps, I had no real understanding about Parliament Funkadelic. But I did know that there was this hilarious looking character with a fake nose disguise (Shock G incognito), talking some Grade-A bullshit over one of the all-time heavy hitter party beats. I bought the cassingle so I could have the instrumental, and the bass from my Bose 901s (I didn’t appreciate what was passed down to me until I was much older and had run them dry) used to rattle my bedroom walls so fiercely that the dishes in the kitchen next door would clink in rhythm.
At the height of the Humpty Hump phenomenon, I went with some of my friends to see them play at this free outdoor festival put on by Majik 102, the first radio station in Houston to regularly play rap music. It was held downtown, in Buffalo Bayou Park and I can’t remember who else played. We strutted our way up close to the stage early while the crowd was still spare, and hours later after that bass from The Humpty Dance faded out, we made our way towards the street to beat out the now massive sludge of human exodus, which was going begrudgingly fine until two older kids flanked my friend and muttered the words no small inner city kid wearing Air Jordans wanted to hear in 1990: Yo. What size them shoes. It wasn’t presented as a question, but as an ultimatum: We’re taking them off your feet, and you don’t have a say in the matter, and it’s your call on how badly this is gonna go for you. There were five of us, but none of us thought to argue, but instead my friend whimpered his little plea: aw man, c’mon…
I remember it going two ways: he either gave them up and we walked home with him in his socks, or we dropped our boards and skated away like we were fleeing from the security guard at our favorite skate spot, laughing that we couldn’t be caught. I think it could have been a combo of both, with Jeff, who didn’t skate and therefore would wear $120 Air Jordans, schlupping the rest of the way back home and having to sit by pitifully and watch us every time we saw a new curb to grind or new set of stairs to ollie. I imagine we were having a great time and were oblivious to Jeff’s misery at the impending doom of him having to tell his full-time working, single mother of two teenagers that his shoes got gaffled. Memory is like that, it’s all true and simultaneously it isn’t.
Shock G was only 57.
And while his relevance is certainly lost on the new generation of drill rappers and Soundcloud producers and Tik Tok dancers, Shock G was brilliant. He recognized genius in others, like a young Tupac Shakur, and helped create that West Coast sound, whether or not Dr Dre gets all the recognition. I’ve been reading personal antidotes from friends of random and small intimate moments with him, like a friend who was deejaying an industry party when Shock G approached the booth and asked if he had any Funkadelic. I love that. In the end, he was just another fan, and he just wanted to hear his favorite group. I’ve read a few others and they all suggest an extremely humble and laid back dude, the very essence of West Coast. It’s a testament to how genuine he was that people recall these seemingly small but very memorable moments with him.
The thing about that Apollo clip I started this ramble off with is that rap music used to be fun. Maybe that’s why I don’t pay attention to rap music today. There is a paucity of joy. There seems to be little escape from the actual reality of end stage Capitalism (except Tobe Ngwige, I’ll listen to anything that dude does). I don’t care about one’s wealth, I don’t care about one’s sexual appetite, even if it is in celebration of emancipation. Certainly, rap was built on that kind of braggadocio but it felt the same as the wink, wink of comedians like Rudy Ray Moore. The dozens. Your mama jokes. Clownin. To me, current rap feels oppressive, the result of the entire world around you focusing a magnifying lens on everything you either aren’t, or can’t have. All of which is fleeting anyway, because its all on loan until we one day return to the dust from whence we came and none of it will actually matter. Content masquerading as culture.
So with that all in mind, let’s laugh. Let’s clown on each other, as well as the world around us, and let’s refuse to let this shitball crush our spirits. I’m sure that is what Shock G wanted.
And just because:
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