Digital Underground

The Digital Underground‘s leader is Greg “Shock G” Jacobs, who also went by the stage name of Humpty Hump. Jacobs spent most of his youth in New York City and southern Florida. Heavily influenced by the various Funk bands of the 1970s, Digital Underground sampled their music frequently, which quickly became a defining element of West Coast rap.

Their ‘alternative’ status owes much to their unabashedly spaced-out image, which lay in contrast to the gangster rap that most west coast acts focused on. The group’s original image was set up to be a tribute to social activists The Black Panthers, but when Public Enemy became a prominent band, Jacobs chose to take the group’s image in a more whimsical direction, that of an updated Parliament-Funkadelic for the hip-hop audience. Jacobs designed detailed album covers and cartoon-laced liner notes, a homage to Parliament-Funkadelic album designs. Digital Underground is also notable for launching the career of member Tupac Shakur.