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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”. The standard deviation for this album is 15.1.“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. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 76.0/100, a mean average of 77.0/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 77.0/100. This album is rated in the top 8% of all albums on. (*In practice, some albums can have several thousand ratings) The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation). However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. Rating metrics: Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. You can include this album in your own chart from the My Charts page! The Cactus Album collection Total Charts: The total number of charts that this album has appeared in. Latest 20 charts that this album appears in: Sort ranks
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