Hi to everyone who’s joining us this week after listening to WIRED’s Gadget Lab podcast! For everyone else: Last week I went on said podcast to discuss a piece I’d written for WIRED around a big piece of VR news, and they were kind enough to plug the newsletter on there. (Your check’s in the mail, Mike.)
Music used to come out on Tuesdays. (Music also used to come out with more than an online rollout’s worth of notice, but that’s for another newsletter.) Walk into any record store, and you were likely to see a dry-erase board unfurling the next couple of months’ worth of releases, clumps of artists and album titles spaced seven days apart. And for much of 1992, anytime I would walk into Tracks on Kirkwood to drop my meager earnings on a rap tape, I would look for one name. Every so often, I’d ask someone working at the store if they knew when that name would show up on the dry-erase board. They never knew. Hell, they barely knew who I was talking about, so they certainly didn’t know why I cared so much. Neither did Norm.
Norm and I had known each other since we were 4, neighborhood kids whose older sisters were classmates, but we became tight in high school, our bond catalyzed by the week-apart releases of A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory and Public Enemy’s Apocalypse ’91. Days neither of us had practice or work or other after-school obligations, Tracks became a habitual stop; outside of the baggies of dirt weed I’d become infatuated with, those tapes were the only thing I cared about buying. Not many, and not often—certainly not often enough to keep up with the deluge that was hip-hop in the early ’90s*—but between what we could scrape together and dubs from other friends and older cousins, we kept a steady soundtrack of the time. MC Breed, Das EFX, Too Short, Redman, Lench Mob, Gang Starr; each imprinted my synapses with its own set of sense memories. All of which made my fixation on this one particular rapper all the more perplexing.
Finally, one day when I’d been thwarted yet again at Tracks, Norm had to know: “Why Serch, though?”
I didn’t know why. Not exactly, not yet. And even if I did, I doubt I would have wanted to acknowledge it.
* * *
MC Serch was one-third of the group 3rd Bass. As with so many hip-hop acts of the time, though, their DJ (Daddy Rich) was a silent and thus almost forgotten force. So what people meant when they said “3rd Bass” was what they heard—MC Serch and his partner, Pete Nice—but also what they saw. Because Michael Berrin (Serch) and Peter Nash (Nice) were both white rappers.
They weren’t the first; the Beastie Boys had gone stratospheric in the 1986, the same year Serch dropped his very first single**. But when 3rd Bass signed with Def Jam (the Beasties’ original label) and dropped The Cactus Album in 1989, Serch and Pete made it their mission to destroy the Beasties’ frat-happy image. The song “Sons of 3rd Bass” turned subtext to just text, with Pete shooting venom at the Licensed to Ill trio: “if a Beast’ wants to play fetus, I'd have him aborted.”
They were both Queens boys, though they cultivated diametrically opposite images. Pete had gone on to study English at Columbia, and usually performed in a suit, holding a cane, an unlit Macanudo in his hand. His voice was just as unflappable, cadence slowed as if to sound more menacing. If Pete was calm and collected, Serch went all the way the other way. Here was a white Jewish kid rocking a high-top fade and a shearling trench, doing the Running Man in his videos, yawping his way through punclines, looking for all the world like Kid ’n’ Play’s hyperactive accountant.
The truth is, I never rocked with 3rd Bass all that heavy. I had dubs of both albums they released, and singles like “Gas Face” became underground classics, but they never broke through to stay in my constant rotation. I found Serch fascinating, though, for reasons far beyond the music—reasons you can probably imagine. It wasn’t that a Jewish dude wearing a Malcolm X cap and using supreme mathematics in his lyrics created some kind of cognitive dissonance for me; it was precisely the opposite. Because a thousand miles away from Queens, my mother’s literal birthplace, I’d been on my own journey in my own X cap.
* * *
Yeah. I know how that sounds. I know how it sounds in my head, at least. It’s exactly why I’ve had Pete Nice’s name written down since the day I dreamed up this newsletter, and exactly why it’s taken me this long to do anything about it. Believe me, this world doesn’t need yet another Lamentation of the White Boy; the point I’m trying to make is that when you’re almost exactly as old as hip-hop itself, your development runs alongside the culture’s own maturation. In other words, the adolescent music began articulating its revolutionary consciousness just as the adolescent me was primed for it—and its references and name-drops led me out out of the music and into the stacks.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice both sat on my parents’ bookshelves, and I devoured them. (They live on my own shelf now, the former a yellowed first paperback edition with a barely-there spine, the latter a loved but intact hardcover.) And I went from there. By the time Third Bass broke up, I was barely old enough to drive, but I had steeped myself in X Clan’s Kemetic schtick and Brand Nubian’s symphonies and Paris’ Panther rhetoric and Poor Righteous Teachers 5 Percenter ragamuffin stylee—and had read everything I could find about the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement.***
However, there’s another wrinkle to all this. Because all the while, I was getting more in touch with my own Judaism than I’d been ever before.
If you think there’s a tension between those two things, you’re not exactly wrong. But you’re also not right. Pitting two historically marginalized communities against each other is the name of the American game, and the powers that be had found in hip-hop an irresistible dividing wedge. It’s not like shit had been sweet before, but once Reagan came and went, Blackness and Judaism were deemed intrinsically, irredeemably at odds. Didn’t matter what the handwringing was about—Sister Souljah, Louis Farrakhan, or the Crown Heights riots of 1991—just mattered what the chorus was. Second verse, same as the first.
So when MC Serch started talking about a solo album, all I knew was that I wanted to hear it. Not because he was my favorite artist (in 1992, that honor was split between Ice Cube and Phife), but because he’d managed to reconcile the same two things I’d been working to reconcile. He knew who he was, and also who he wasn’t. He clearly loved that he could rock a high-top fade—hell, he wrote about it recently in a column for a local paper in his old Queens neighborhood—but years before Eminem would make a career out of it, Serch managed to interrogate whiteness and acknowledge his own, all the while participating in a distinctly Black artform in a way that can only be described as mindful.****
Finally, in late 1992, Serch’s name went up on the dry-erase board at Tracks. The Return of the Product was exactly as fine as I’d thought it would be; the best thing about it, by far, was the groundshaking feature from a young Nas on “Back to the Grill.” (Serch wound up helping Nas sign to Sony, and executive-produced Illmatic.) Pete Nice’s own marginally better solo album would come out the following year.***** It wouldn’t be long, of course, before hip-hop exploded into a pop juggernaut that had very different needs and ideals.
Old-head sentimentality aside, I wonder sometimes what young rap fans feel. Different emotions run at the surface of the music. Artists still have images, sure, but when the world was small and media wasn’t social, the only way to cultivate an image was to be there when and where it was happening. Everything else went into the music. And you might not be able to see it live at the Latin Quarter or wherever else, but you knew it would eventually get into your headphones. It said so right there on that dry-erase board.
*The days of “what’s the best musical year hip-hop ever had” arguments are long gone—in part because of there are just so damn many of them, in part because hip-hop has been the primary engine of pop culture for decades now—but if they ever come back, the fastest way to end that argument is just to pick a year between 1991 and 1995. Probably 1993.
** All of them had been beaten to the punch by a Brooklyn graffiti writer and rapper known variously as KEO, Kid Benetton, and Lord Scotch. As KEO, he’d been part of the all-city graf crew TC5; as Scotch, he and Pete Nice had formed the ill fated rap group Servin’ Generals. He also happens to be the brother of the novelist Jonathan Lethem—and his Instagram is a straight-up treasure trove of NYC hip-hop history.
*** If you’re doing the math, that means I’ve been making “Yacub the big-headed scientist” jokes for almost 30 years now. Hand to heart, Norm wrote a high school history paper that included a hilariously inflammatory sentence about ”white devils,” and cited it as a sentence once uttered by, and I quote here, “noted scholar Peter Rubin.“ I think the teacher was too scared to call him out on it.
**** If you’ve never seen (or have just forgotten about) Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, it features a militant hip-hop group called the Mau Maus. The Mau Maus happened to have one white member. Guess who Spike cast?
***** As did one of the weirdest rap albums of 1993, Future Profits, courtesy of the Eazy-E-signed all-Jewish trio Blood of Abraham. If you need more BoA, catch them on Eazy’s jaw-droppingly ill-conceived “N****z and Jews” (also featuring a young Will.i.am!).
One Thing I Can’t Get Enough of This Week
🧐 Outside the Box Puzzles
I thought about celebrating the first Kendrick Lamar verse in a year—if there’s anyone who makes me feel the excitement of being a young rap fan, it’s Dot—but I just wrote like 1500 words on hip-hop, so let’s switch gears. For six years now, puzzle maker and Jeopardy champ Joon Pahk has been running Outside the Box, a subscription service; every week, he emails you a type of puzzle called a Rows Garden, which is like a good crossword with all the clue numbers taken out. (You can try one for free here. Try the “thorny” difficulty if you’re feeling froggy.) It’s tough to imagine getting more out of $20 than that. Even better, Year Seven starts next week! Get after it, nerds. (Subscribe here.)