On Saturday (May 1st), family and friends celebrated the life of Shock G, born Gregory Jacobs in a private funeral at the Allen Temple A.M.E. Church in Tampa, Florida — which is his hometown. Shock G was found unresponsive in a Tampa hotel room on April 22nd. He was 57. No cause of death has been released yet. According to B. Scott.com via WFLA, celebrities like Ronald “Money B” Brooks of Digital Underground, Bootsy Collins, producer Kwame, Chuck D, Yo Yo, Sway, DJ Premier, Big Daddy Kane, MC Serch, Treach of Naughty By Nature, Cee-Lo Green, Busta Rhymes, Jermaine Dupri and more attended the service. The funeral was live streamed.
Reverend Doctor Alesia Ford- Burse said at the service, “His legacy was how he loved people unconditionally. He loved to a default.”
Money B said about his friend and bandmate, “People talk about him as a great musician, a great artist or whatever, but he was 10 times the human. He wanted everyone around him to be comfortable and happy, in spite of what made him happy.”
Tom Silverman, the head of Tommy Boy Records — who signed Digital Underground to their record label, called Shock G a genuis and a visionary. He said, “When Tommy Boy signed Digital Underground, we didn’t just sign Greg Jacobs, we signed all of his multiple personalities. We signed Shock G, Edward Ellington Humphrey the Third, The Piano Man, MC Blowfish, The Computer Woman, and even the artist Rackadelic. Gregory Edward Jacobs was the one I had the most trouble getting to know, and maybe that’s true of a bunch of us here because he was always in a persona.”
He continued, “He could have been a Walt Disney. He was that kind of genius. He was like the Nikola Tesla of hip hop, except that he has a great sense of humor. You never knew when he was serious and when he was joking. Even when I saw him in the casket yesterday, I fully expected him to smile and wink at me because that’s the kind of thing he would do.”
Public Enemy's Chuck D appeared via video, calling Jacobs a “musician, an artist, a humorist, a performer, a pioneering A&R agent and a bandmaker….forever we’re grateful for everything that Shock G did for the genre, as well as being somebody I considered a friend, somebody who always said he looked up to me, and I looked up to him, too….”
He added, “Long live Shock G for just stretching the boundaries stretching it out, and making us all have fun with this hip-hop thing.”
Shock G is survived by his mother, Shirley Kraft, his father, Edward Racker and his brother and sister Kent Racker and Elizabeth Racker.
