RIP Shock G
Shock G begins Digital Underground’s breakout hit “The Humpty Dance” by brashly promising, “All right! Stop whatcha doin/'Cause I'm about to ruin/The image and the style that ya used to.”
It’s an audacious way to open a song even by Hip Hop standards but Shock G backed up his words with action. From the vantage point of 2021 it can be easy to forget what a casually revolutionary, subversive figure Shock G was at the beginning of a glorious but too brief life and career.
With his alter-ego Humpty Hump, Shock G broke all the rules. He broke the mold. He represented something new and fresh and unprecedented. In a hip hop realm that prioritized toughness above all else Shock G was unashamedly silly. He refused to take himself seriously. He was an irreverent clown in pimp couture and Groucho Marx glasses whose persona was boldly, brazenly ridiculous.
He delighted in absurdity. If done correctly, “The Humpty Dance” was supposed to alternately suggest “MC Hammer on crack”, a “fit” or a “convulsion.” The song is filled with glorious, eminently quotable non-sequiturs, most notably “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.”
Seemingly everyone in Hip Hop during its golden age borrowed the sounds, grooves and monster choruses of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic collective. But no one understood Clinton’s aesthetic the way Shock G did.
It’s difficult to overstate Clinton’s influence on Shock G and Digital Underground. Where producers like Dr. Dre were content to borrow the sound of Parliament-Funkadelic , Shock G essentially sampled the entirety of George Clinton.
P-funk was the cornerstone of Digital Underground’s sound but its influence went beyond that. Shock G also borrowed Clinton’s predilection for creating a seemingly endless series of alter-egos, the sillier and more random the better.
Shock G wasn’t just Humpty Hump. He was also Piano Man, MC Blowfish, Icey-Michael Boston, The Computer Woman, ButtaFly, and Peanut Hakeem. Those altar-egos reflected a sense of humor that was cartoonish in the most literal possible sense in that the multi-talented rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist also drew the covers of Digital Underground singles and albums.
When Shock G rapped about sex it was from the sex positive perspective of someone who enjoyed sex as a form of communication and a way of giving and receiving pleasure, not as a form of power or control.
That’s what Shock G was all about: spreading joy and laughter. For a brief, shining moment Shock G and his ebullient brand of tomfoolery liberated Hip Hop from the plague of self-seriousness and reconnected it with the fizzy, dizzy high spirits of Old School rap.
Underneath Shock G’s outrageousness lie an underlying seriousness. The Groucho Marx/Tony Clifton of Hip Hop famously mentored perhaps its greatest icon when G took a hungry, talented young rapper and actor named Tupac Shakur under his wing and gave him an opportunity to tour and record with Digital Underground at the very beginning of his career.
Shakur repaid the favor by having Shock G produce and guest on “I Get Around”, which hit number 11 on the pop charts. G also produced and provided guest vocals for the early 2Pac single “Trapped.” G also appears in the video to defiantly promise on the hook, “Uh uh, they can't keep the black man down.”
Before Shakur could establish himself as a dramatic actor of tremendous power with his career-making turn in Juice he appeared alongside Shock G and the rest of Digital Underground in a cameo in Nothing But Trouble as a hip hop outfit that has the misfortune to get pulled over in the evil town ruled by Dan Aykroyd’s demented judge.
It was an exceedingly odd scene in a uniquely bizarre motion picture. In that respect it fit Digital Underground’s oddball sensibility perfectly.
Shock G went on to tour with George Clinton and underground favorite MURS (I got to see him DJ a MURS show in Chicago and was blown away that a star like him would provide back-up for an artist like MURS) and got to work with fan Prince, who was known to cover “Humpty Dance” in concert.
Digital Underground played the Gathering of the Juggalos one of the years I unfortunately did not attend. They were the perfect act for the Gathering, bona fide hip hop legends whose irresistible hits provided the summer soundtrack to our lives but who were decades removed from their professional peak.
Shock G is like many other icons who’ve rocked the Gathering in that he is no longer with us as well. He’s another giant of hip hop taken too soon but he leaves behind a legacy of joy and pride and subversion.
G may have been George Clinton’s creative progeny but he was also one of pop culture’s true originals.
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