3rd Bass

The two white MCs of 3rd Bass made much of the fact that they deserved the respect that they had won from the hip-hop community. MC Serch (Queens native Michael Berring) was a chubby four-eyes with a bottomless supply of lyrical put-downs; rockabilly-coiffed partner Pete Nice (Brooklyn-born Pete Nash, an English major at Columbia University) maintained a slightly slicker microphone mien. Backed by DJ Richie Rich (the Jamaican-born Richard Lawson), Serch and Pete Nice were meticulous, dues-paying hip-hop scholars whose debut The Cactus Album became an instant classic. On "Gas Face," they effectively used witty disses to stake out their territory; "Triple Stage Darkness" was just one of the album's amped-up anthems. Cactus Revisited, an early example of hip-hop's now-ubiquitous remix album (note to P. Diddy: you didn't invent it) was inessential then, and still is.

Proper second album Derelicts of Dialect was just as solid and even more expansive, as the group, like Serch said, got "cool to the cut/shaking butts off of ledges/came a longer way than Benson & Hedges." Serch plainly relished detailing his hip-hop credentials on "Portrait of the Artist as a Hood," just one Derelicts track that benefited from production by Sam Sever, whose funky, buoyant beats had the propulsion of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad but with warmer corners. (Side note: Sever and Bosco Money's duo Downtown Science put out a fantastic, nearly forgotten self-titled album in '91, also on Def Jam.) Derelicts' hit single "Pop Goes the Weasel" looped Peter Gabriel's smash "Sledgehammer" and had a memorable video in which 3rd Bass pummeled the crap out of a Vanilla Ice stand-in (a trick that the similarly skin-tone-sensitive Eminem used in concert against Everlast a decade later). But while 3rd Bass got busy dissing Vanilla Ice, the footloose Serch was leveled on wax by Beastie Boy MCA with the infamous couplet "you're wack, son/dancing around like you think you're Janet Jackson."

3rd Bass disbanded in 1992, but postsplit releases such as MC Serch's Return of the Product (with its smoking single "Back to the Grill Again") and Prime Minister Pete Nice & DJ Daddy Rich's 1993 Dust to Dust suggested separation did not mean death. All parties soon faded from the frontlines, however. Serch became an A&R man at Wild Pitch (his most famous discovery was Nas) while Pete Nice opened up a baseball memorabilia store in Cooperstown, New York. (PETER RELIC)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide