Sex Packets turns 35, and Digital Underground are bringing it to The Regent on September 3.
The record landed in 1990 and immediately refused to fit anywhere. It was a rap album, a concept album about a fictional drug, a Parliament-Funkadelic tribute, and a comedy record, often inside the same song. The Humpty Dance became a permanent fixture of American radio, Doowutchyalike set the template for the group's whole approach, and buried in the credits was a young roadie and backup dancer named Tupac Shakur, who would appear on record for the first time with this crew.
Shock G's fingerprints are all over it. The piano playing, the Humpty Hump character, the production that treated funk as something to be inhabited rather than sampled and moved past. Thirty-five years on, Sex Packets holds up because it was never chasing a trend. It was too strange to date.
The show is 18+. Doors at 7:00 PM, music at 8:00 PM, at The Regent's downtown room at 448 South Main.
Anniversary runs for records this old can feel like museum pieces. Sex Packets resists that, mostly because the album's own logic was absurd and joyful, and that translates live better than earnest classics do. The songs were built for a room to move to, and the theatrical elements that made Digital Underground a live act in the first place are still the point.
Digital Underground's whole aesthetic, loose and funk-driven and unbothered, has always sat comfortably alongside West Coast smoke culture, and the crowd this bill draws reflects that. Expect a wide age range and a room that knows the material cold.
For anyone mapping the Bay Area's contribution to hip-hop, this record is a load-bearing wall. For anyone who just wants to hear The Humpty Dance played loud by the people who made it, that works too.
Los Angeles gets its share of legacy hip-hop bookings. This is one of the ones worth clearing the calendar for.