#19: Digital Underground - Sex Packets

In my experience with hip-hop, save for Run-DMC and early Nas, you're going to get a shitload of tracks on your albums. Nearing twenty tracks per record seems like some sort of perverse goal, but oddly, it seemed to work in the early days. But, in accordance with the nature of creating pop songs and to avoid redundancy, none of the tracks dragged on for too long. But then came Sex Packets.

Released in 1990, Sex Packets was the Digital Underground's first album, and despite the group's notoriety for being Tupac's first home, he was only a dancer at this point, and doesn't actually appear on a track until the subsequent EP, 1991's This is an EP Release. Anyhow, Sex Packets has a bunch of tracks. And for rap songs, they're all long as hell. There's a handful of seven and eight-minute manifestos, the likes of which hadn't been heard since songs like "The Breaks" or "Rapper's Delight." By the time I finished the third track on Sex Packets, I would have been eight tracks deep into a Dizzee Rascal album.

Length aside, everything is pretty solid, and the song structures don't tend to allow for much meandering. Lyrics like "I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom" make "The Humpty Dance" one of the more out-there songs for Weird Al to ever include in one of his medleys, though I guess he did throw "Closer" into one. Yeah, I listened to Weird Al when I was 10. Do something.

For my taste, the seven-minute title track is the album's most interesting song, utilizing a much slower tempo and not much rapping - more like strained singing - and the tone is enough to make it stand out. Ignoring the lyrics, the song actually sounds genuinely sweet, which is a rather different attitude from the rest of the record.

On the whole, Sex Packets is an absolute beast to absorb all at once. I might as well try to memorize Life After Death or Sandinista in an evening. It's hard to see how this will be an album I'll ever really want to put on from start to finish, but the individual songs will definitely be welcomed when they come up on shuffle. But being as unfamiliar with the tracks as I am, my first spin through Sex Packets was really more like homework than a party-starter. I'll give it time.

"The Humpty Dance"