If there is one group that undeservedly got slept on in the past couple of decades, it has to be Digital Underground. After a strong start with their debut album Sex Packets, featuring “The Humpty Dance,” one of the most side-splittingly funny and straight banging tracks ever to put to wax, and the strong follow up Sons of the P the group disappeared from most hip-hop fans radar.
The fact is Digital Underground never stopped putting out music. The group has a strong cult following and a well deserved reputation as being one of the truly phenomenal live acts in hip-hop.
As of now Digital Underground are taking a indefinite hiatus after almost twenty years of nonstop touring and recording, but if your lucky you can still find copies of overlooked and under appreciated albums like The Body-Hat Syndrome (Easily the Sgt Pepper of hip-hop albums) or the masterful Who Got the Gravy? in stock at the local music shop or at iTunes.
Just in case the musical resume isn’t enough to impress, it is also important to point out that Digital Underground’s core members, Shock-G and Money-B, are the ones responsible for discovering the late megastar Tupac Shakur.
While the band is temporally retired, rapper Money-B, the self-anointed “gangster” of the group, is working on several projects and we were lucky enough to spend some time chatting with him.
So what lead to Digital Underground’s recent decision to take and extended hiatus?
Well, we have been on the road since like '89 and Shock just decided he needed to refocus himself. It’s nothing like “we’ve broke up” or anything, he just wanted to do some other stuff like write a book and explore some different kind of music that he felt he didn’t want to use the Digital Underground name for. It’s not like we are gone forever but we are on hiatus.
You have been doing your own radio show for a minute now, tell us about that.
The radio show is called “The Going Way Back Show with Money-B” and it is an old school hip-hop radio show. The tagline is “Classic Hip-Hop raw and uncut” and what I try to play Hip-Hop that was released before 1999, what I consider the golden era of Hip-Hop.
Article comments
1 - Brandon
The web link to his site @ the end of the article is wrong. You can hit his site up @ Moneyb.net
2 - Porkchop
Great article!!! Money-B has been putting a lot of non-stop work into the hip hop culture for twenty plus years. He has more loyalty and passion for the game than most artists have ever shown and/or displayed!!!