Digital Underground Keeps Hip-Hop on Top

In the beginning, hip-hop’s slang, locution, noise , excluded the squares, and a basic understanding of the idiom was a mark of hipness in certain circles, as knowledge of be-bop lingo had been 30 years before.

By the mid-’80s, when hip-hop had basically devolved into a medium for novelty songs, hard rappers became popular: Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and N.W.A in succession pushed the envelope of what was possible, both in sound and in hard-core attitude, and each in turn produced the defining style of a year. Hard rap, like punk, brought together a self-selected community of kids by becoming the image of what their parents feared most.

But MTV’s “Yo! MTV Raps” exposed the entire population to hip-hop, Time and Newsweek discussed the semantics of rap, and suddenly, this year, every hip teen’s parents know what it means to feel cold dookie retarded. Hip-hop is the new vernacular.

In 1990, the Oakland rap group Digital Underground is the new sound, a shot of funky Adrenalin into a hip-hop scene increasingly dominated by frothy pop and gangsters-of-the-week. Its debut LP “Sex Packets,” released this month, sold half a million in two weeks; its last single, “Humpty Dance”, went platinum (a million seller) after eight.

D. U. announced its break with the hard sound subtly--in a piano solo somewhere near the end of its 1989 single “Doowutchyalike.” The debonair, 30-second lounge medley of hard hip-hop hits recontextualized rap as a mainstream in its own right, as commodifiable as any other music. Public Enemy and KRS-One songs turn out to be as capable of being denatured as anything by Lionel Richie . . . so why not be funky instead of political?

Nearly all of “Sex Packets” is based on riffs laid down by P-Funk maestro George Clinton in the late ‘70s, which is an effective way to ensure a certain continuity. But the Digital Underground thing isn’t where they find their samples, but what they do with them. With a D. U. song there’s the sense of a moment examined, an electron microscope turned on a specific musical event, of suspended time. Plus, you can dance to it.

“Humpty Dance,” a party jam with vocals by D. U.’s character rapper Humpty Hump, is based around a second or two of Parliament’s “Let’s Play House.”

The original cut is obstinately dissonant, as if Clinton wanted to prove how outside a dance track could go. D. U. grafts the vocal refrain and a bit of the bass to a typical Parliament high-hat tap, woozy one-note keyboard bass and a single off-beat guitar note each bar. D. U. remembered the Clinton secret where Clinton hadn’t--when set against the squarest beat, even the simplest syncopations swing way funky.

The Digital Underground universe is hermetic, a sealed system. That is because, far from being the “reality rap” popular last year, “Sex Packets” is fantasy rap, an LP describing a gentle, imaginary world where certain drugs are cheap, safe and pleasurable; where the Clash, the Who and EPMD share the stage at Gutfest, the local music festival; where race is irrelevant, women enjoy wrestling naked in cages and there are two girls for every guy . . . most of whom are classy, but prefer hip-hop to Bach.

The LP itself, a concept album in the great tradition of Clinton and the Beatles and Public Enemy, all revolves around the band’s “discovery” of sex packets, pills which they claim NASA developed to chemically satisfy the carnal urges of astronauts.

It might be possible to listen to this album and map out Digitaland: the concert halls; the bushes behind which lurk packet salesmen; the mean streets; the swank clubs. At the foot of the boulevard lies the bay, where even the fish party down.

The only law? “Doowutchyalike”: hip-hop libertarianism.

(The cassette of “Sex Packets,” which contains three tracks that aren’t on the CD, is sequenced differently enough to make it fundamentally a different work.)

POP DATE BOOK Fleetwood Mac will play June 8 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. Tickets on sale Sunday. . . . Also on sale Sunday are David Byrne at the Hollywood Palladium on June 14 and the Greek Theatre on June 15, Tears for Fears at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on May 27, Rickie Lee Jones and Lyle Lovett at the Greek Theatre on July 11 and World Party on May 23 at the Roxy. . . . Two Universal Amphitheatre shows go on sale Sunday: Stevie B. on June 17 and Smokey Robinson and Natalie Cole on July 6 and 7.