Any song could have been a single but the ones that WERE singles were monsters. Even though the trio was not meant to be long lived due to creative differences between Pete Nice and Serch, this was the first of two back to back albums that still hold up as hip-hop classics decades later. The only thing I can tell you is that as an avid listener of hip-hop at the time “The Gas Face” turned me on to 3rd Bass, and “ The Cactus Album” turned me on to the group as a whole. In real life Stanley Burrell was so pissed about this and the line “ The Cactus turned Hammer’s mother out“ on the album that he put a HIT on 3rd Bass.Īgain teenage Flash with no internet was not privy to any of the drama. The song’s infamous outro saw them return to their anti-pop rap stance by loudly declaring “HAMMER! SHUT THE FUCK UP” while the music video saw them give a beatdown to an oversized novelty hammer. drop bars long before the days he’d become better known as MF DOOM. The third verse cemented this by having a guest appearance by Zev Love X of K.M.D. “Black cat is bad luck, bad guys wear black/Musta been a white guy that started all that” quipped Serch, setting an entirely different standard other than anti-commercialism - one of being “woke” long before that word entered our collective lexicon. If so the irony here is that the overnight success of “The Gas Face” made 3rd Bass just as commercially viable as the same artists they were dissing.Īlthough the aforementioned Sam Sever handled most of the production duties on “ The Cactus Album“, famed De La Soul maestro Prince Paul was the man behind this classic jam. “strictly underground funk, keep the crossover” as EPMD would later opine. Perhaps 3rd Bass was attempting to establish a strident “real hip-hop” movement where the commercial success of songs like “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” was not allowed, i.e. I didn’t then nor do I now think of the Beasties as being any more or less legitimately hip-hop than 3rd Bass. It wasn’t obvious to due to the fact that MC Serch and the Boys have one really big thing in common - they’re all white guys of Jewish descent from the boroughs of New York. In hindsight though it’s not hard to pick up on the double entendre of lines like “The Beast now lives in the Capitol “ and Pete Nice referring to them as “three bastard sons” he gave birth to. At the time all I cared about was how fly the rhymes from MC Serch and Pete Nice were, how ill the scratches from Richie Rich sounded, and how dope the Sam Sever track was - sampling from Blood, Sweat & Tears for the music and from Edgar Bergen for comedic lines like “He is stupid, but he KNOWS that he is stupid, and that ALMOST makes him smart”. It's just unfortunate that while 3rd Bass might have been one of the most underappreciated hip-hop acts around, this patchy remix collection too frequently gives their detractors more than enough ammo to fire back at them.“Pop figures who figured they’d get paid/Exploiting art the black man made”Īs a teenage Flash when “ The Cactus Album” first released in 1989, the fact that “Sons of 3rd Bass” was a Beastie Boys diss song completely flew over my head. In any case, for those desperately looking for anything new from a band cut too short in their career, Cactus Revisited might still placate such woes. Plus, to make matters worse, the previously unreleased "3 Strikes 5000" quickly loses its collector gem value since it later appeared on the band's superb Derelicts of Dialect full-length. "Wordz of Wisdom," for instance, is clearly the worst delinquent because despite an absolutely delightful use of Depeche Mode samples, it quickly staggers as it tries to stretch out into its eight-minute entirety. Some remixes such as the more danceable version of "The Cactus" or Prince Paul's terrifically energized take on "Gas Face" are mighty entertaining, but others seem to just sit on their thumbs and lengthen the original tracks. A bit of a between-album attempt to keep the band in people's sights, Cactus Revisited takes most of the biggest hits from 3rd Bass' debut and hands them over to such respected mixers as Marley Marl, Dave Darrell, and Prince Paul for them to play with.
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