3rd Bass

So begins the lead-off track of the first 3rd Bass album, The Cactus Album (or The Cactus Cee-D, if you prefer digital). Although they only released two albums, 3rd Bass was a significant addition to the rap canon (boom!) and an important and timely symbol. Up until that point (1989), rap had been almost exclusively a black man’s game, but nothing could get that big without somebody trying to co-opt it and sell it to a larger, whiter audience. Almost inevitably, when white artists tackle what had been a largely black form, they are accused of cultural imperialism, and often correctly. This has happened repeatedly from jazz on through soul and rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll. And, like I said, many times these accusations are correct. Many early white performers of a predominantly black music watered it down and smoothed the edges a bit to appeal to the perceived tastes of their audience and, in return, they are often rewarded with greater stature and success than those true innovators that they stole from. It’s a contentious cultural phenomenon and helps propagate the ugly spectre of racism. So, Paul Whiteman (too symbolic a name to make up) became the “King of Swing” by riding the backs of the unsung heroes who really advanced the art form. And Elvis Presley becomes the King of Rock ’n’ Roll by stealing black rhythm and blues songs and making them his own.

But occasionally, some early white practitioners of a black art form are good enough and respectful enough to add to the canon without taking away from the originators. Such is the case with 3rd Bass.

It was a tricky time in the hip hop world. Rap, which had really only started gaining a toehold in popular culture a decade before, had blown up into a giant movement, and had started pouring out of the inner cities and into the suburbs and the larger country beyond. And some white musicians and label owners couldn’t help but notice and tried to get in on some of the action. And many of them started having immediate success, which led to justifiable grumbling among the originators and practitioners of rap, another example of The Man stealing and swindling and getting rich off the work of others. And it didn’t help that the biggest rap stars in the country at that time – in terms of sales and general visibility – were white. And lame. Most people give the white trio The Beastie Boys props as legitimate rappers, and very little hostility is aimed at them. I am not so charitable. Although they had the first #1 rap album, I can’t really take them seriously. Whether they are or not, they sound like poseurs to me most of the time – a couple of frat boy white guys rapping and toasting over some cool beats. At least here, they got that right. Their grooves are usually impeccable, and the only album of theirs I really like is a collection of instrumental tracks called The In Sound from Way Out (title stolen from Perrey & Kingsley). Their raps, however, are irritating and insincere. But I am apparently alone in this opinion, as they were and continue to be embraced by the wider (and not just whiter) hip hop community.

More of a problem was Vanilla Ice. Vanilla Ice tore up the charts when he appeared, his debut album sitting on top of the hill for a few weeks, clocking in the second #1 rap album by a white artist. But unlike The Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice wasn’t fooling anybody. He invented a sordid past to give himself street cred, but he was so obviously not of the streets that his whole story stank from day one. He was cute (I guess) and a reasonably good dancer (I suppose), but he was no rapper. But neither were the seven million suburban teenagers that bought his album. He got in legal trouble because his hit song Ice Ice Baby blatantly stole a riff from a popular David Bowie/Queen song called Under Pressure, and he just dug himself deeper into a hole by denying there was any real connection between the two.

It was a funny time for sampling. The technology had just been made widely affordable, and lots of rap acts were using samples extensively. It was often used as tribute or commentary, and harkened back to the original days of rap when the DJ would find a particularly good groove in a song (“the break”), and repeat it over and over again, giving the rapper something to rap over and driving the crowd into a funky frenzy. Also, it was a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to “bite” somebody else’s groove than to construct one yourself. But, invariably, sampling starting coming under fire from the copyright holders and people had to either clear their samples – a time- and money-consuming headache – or drop them entirely. As an example, the first De La Soul album used innumerable samples – in fact, the entire album is constructed from them – but they got it in under the wire. Their second album was delayed by a year while they slowly got sample permissions and excised the bits they couldn’t get permission to use. If they tried to release their first album now, it would never see the light of day.

While the labels and the courts were figuring out what to do about sampling, rules were quite arbitrary. Somebody like MC Hammer could build an entire career out of lifting one cool sample (in his case, it was from the Rick James party classic Superfreak) and rapping over the top of it without materially changing it at all. As a particularly strange bit of irony, MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This made a recent list of the best American songs of the 20th century (which is a travesty in itself), but the song that it is lifted part and parcel from was nowhere to be found. Vanilla Ice wasn’t so lucky, and he took a lot of heat for stealing the Bowie/Queen riff, and even more for his absurd denials. Although he did get it on with notoriously bad-taste-in-men Madonna, and appeared in risqué poses with her in her scandalous Sex book.

Still, even though he was clearly a ridiculous pretender with zero street cred and only the barest knowledge of what he was supposed to be doing, the success of Vanilla Ice created strong and disturbing rifts in the community. Once again, it seemed like the white man was stealing the black man’s art, making a mockery of it, and growing rich in the process.

And then along came 3rd Bass. Led by two white boys – one from Brooklyn, one from Queens – 3rd Bass had the chops and the smarts to honor rap without ripping it off. Thanks in no small part to their production by top shelf rap producers The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy’s producers) and Prince Paul (De La Soul’s producer), 3rd Bass hit the ground running, and proved that white rappers could contribute to the art form without degrading it or selling it out. It also helped that they released a vicious and hilarious comeuppance for Vanilla Ice called Pop Goes the Weasel (showcasing one of the hookiest samples of all-time, the opening of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer), that showed clearly what side of the debate 3rd Bass was on, and that those lines weren’t racial in nature. They proved by example that you could be white and legitimate, and their two albums were immediately embraced by the hip hop community. In fact, I heard an interview with somebody who used to play basketball with MC Serch (not (duh) his real name), who said he was floored when Serch had to leave a basketball game to go to temple one Saturday because he had no idea that Serch wasn’t black. I find that a little hard to believe, but it does strengthen their ties to the black, urban hip hop community.

This track uses another incredibly catchy riff – this one is, I believe, from Blood Sweat and Tears’ Spinning Wheel – and shows off their wonderful verbal dexterity, which is the true measure of the man in the rap game. By speaking up and keeping their act moving, 3rd Bass healed a giant racial rift in the making, threatening to poison rap and its growing audience.