Artist · chart history
Digital Underground
Band Oakland United States Active 1987–2008 hip hop
Digital Underground formed in 1987 in Oakland, United States and was active until 2008. Digital Underground has 10 chart appearances on 7 radio countdowns from 7 stations on RockLists, spanning 1990–2025. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “The Humpty Dance”, which appears on 7 lists with a best position of #85. The station that charted Digital Underground most often is 90.9 The Bridge (Kansas City, MO), with 4 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1990.
Digital Underground came out of Oakland in 1987, put together by their leader and mainstay Gregory "Shock G" Jacobs with Kenneth "Kenny-K" Waters, a Tampa hip-hop radio DJ, and Jimi "Chopmaster J" Dright from Berkeley. They were funk fanatics first and last: their records sampled '70s funk left and right, and Jacobs, working as "Rackadelic", drew album covers and cartoon-crammed liner notes as a love letter to Parliament-Funkadelic.
"Doowutchyalike" got them noticed in the summer of 1989, and in 1990 came "The Humpty Dance", off Sex Packets, a rubber-limbed goof of a party record riding a bottomless groove. That year brought Grammy and MTV Video Music Award nominations. The crew also gave Tupac Shakur his start and spun off side projects and solo acts like Raw Fusion, Saafir and Mystic. Shock G and Money-B were the only two on every album, with DJ Fuze and J-Beats helping shape the sound. Shock G died in 2021.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Digital Underground on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Humpty Dance | 7 | #85 | – | 1990 | |
| 2 | Doowuchyalike | 1 | #244 | – | – | |
| 3 | Way We Swing | 1 | #627 | – | – | |
| 4 | Same Song | 1 | #847 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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