G’s remix of “Love Sign” appeared on Prince’s 1998’s Crystal Ball – but the track had been completed several years earlier and so G had forgotten all about it. So I didn’t want to appear like I was Prince – like I was above it all or this god, which is how I looked at him.” At that time, if you seemed like you knew a lot about playing music you were considered less hip-hop. “I figured the more MC’s you would see… the less the fans would figure out that I was the piano man and Humpty Hump and Shock G. I loved that he did it all in the studio by himself.” He added that he’d wanted Digital Underground to be a supergroup with a revolving lineup. And on top of that, I was a huge Prince fan. I was a self-taught musician on piano… Playing instruments was something you didn’t see in hip-hop. In the same interview, G discussed how Prince had influenced him from an early age, saying: “I had one foot in hip-hop being a DJ and the other foot in P-Funk. But ended up not doing it because nobody felt the beat but me.” … It was that ‘Fuck The World’ beat, which was really a Prince remake. … He played the tape for me and when the third beat ran out some old, dusty shit that I had taped over and didn’t want no one to hear came on. “Pac calls me back in Oakland and he’s like, ‘I like the first one and the fourth one.’ And I’m puzzled because I only sent three tracks.

“I sent three good songs to Pac for the Me Against The World album,” G told Vibe in 2010. But “Fuck the World,” which G created out of his admiration for Prince, was never intended to be given to 2Pac, and its writer believed its life had ended after Digital Underground had rejected it.

Me against the world album songs