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in general, stirring an interest that other rap groups, from Public Enemy to N.W.A, filled in the years to come. For their part, the Beastie Boys followed their success by temporarily taking themselves out of the game. After an infamous tour for Licensed to Ill, during which they were accused of, among many things, deriding terminally ill children while abroad, they quarreled with their label over money and parted ways for a few years, eventually relocating to L.A. In 1989, the Beastie Boys proved themselves truly innovative, pushing the boundaries of sampling culture and predicting the prismatic genre-mixing of nineties pop music with the stunning but somewhat commercially unsuccessful Paul’s Boutique, produced by the up-and-coming duo, the Dust Brothers in 1989. The group has since defined modern white b-boy “alternative” style, the eclectic state in which hip-hop, punk rock, funk, and skateboarder culture resides. The band’s fan base, despite the lengthy breaks between record releases, had not forgotten them: After four years away, the Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty debuted at number one on the Top 200 Album charts in 1998.

Past and present masters: Eminem and Rakim, 2002.

A less commercially viable but more traditional white rap group was 3rd Bass, a trio of two white rappers, including Prime Minister Pete Nice (Pete Nash) and MC Serch (Michael Berrin), plus a black DJ, Richie Rich (Richard Lawson). White hip-hop artists like Marky Mark and Vanilla Ice fabricated or embellished tough upbringings and paid the price with their loss of popularity, but 3rd Bass did not: Both rappers were from Queens and spent the 1980s winning respect and taking their share of boos at club shows. 3rd Bass was the first white rap group with street-style rhymes and attitude; they lambasted the Beastie Boys for their rich-kid backgrounds, ridiculed MC Hammer, and recorded a Vanilla Ice parody, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which, ironically, became their biggest hit in 1991. In the video for that song, 3rd Bass even beat up a Vanilla Ice impersonator, played by punk-rock icon Henry Rollins. “Pop Goes the Weasel” was an interesting twist in the white rap credibility war, because 3rd Bass’s parody hit was based on the same formula that Puff Daddy would use in the nineties and that Vanilla Ice had used for “Ice Ice Baby”—lifting a recognizable refrain from a hit song almost in its entirety. Ice borrowed from Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” while 3rd Bass did the same from Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” Nonetheless, whereas the Beastie Boys created their own talent pool after their debut album, 3rd Bass worked with some of the most proven, respected hip-hop producers of the day, such as the Bomb Squad and Prince Paul. 3rd Bass disbanded in 1992, and MC Serch worked as a solo artist while Pete Nice and DJ Richie Rich worked as a group, releasing albums that failed to equal the sum of their parts. MC Serch has remained devoted to hip-hop, as a spokesman against payola in radio and as head of artist development at the short-lived, highly respected record label Wild Pitch; Pete Nice retired from the game to open a baseball memorabilia store. Though 3rd Bass’s public profile was not as high as that of the Beastie Boys, 3rd Bass proved, perhaps more so than the Beastie Boys, that every white rapper isn’t a sham.

The litmus test for past white rappers remains the same for those today: authenticity and devotion to the culture. White teens brought up on rap and turned on to rhyme appeared in greater numbers than ever before in the nineties, with names like Miilkbone, Cage, Eminem, R.A. the Rugged Man, and Remedy, all of who have had tough upbringings, the backing of hip-hop royalty, or both. Rappers such as Eminem and Cage detail revenge fantasies and the damage of troubled childhoods in their music—Eminem’s broken home and Cage’s time in a mental institution as a teenager, where he was placed by his stepfather. Miilkbone was brought up in New Jersey projects; Remedy, a rapper from a wealthy family who boasts the backing of the Wu-Tang Clan, writes rhymes