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" About 20 or so years ago, things were so bad between Prime Minister Pete Nice and MC Serch that the two trailblazing rappers went years without speaking and, despite all their work together, were content to pretend the other didn&amp;#039;t exist.  After the ugly and abrupt 1991 demise of 3rd Bass, Serch, a Queens-bred, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing art school grad, produced and cultivated rap star Nas and went on to host the popular VH1 reality show The White Rapper. Pete Nice, a Brooklyn native and Columbia University radio jock with a gravelly voice and shady gangsta lean, left the business altogether and embarked on an unlikely journey to become one of the country&amp;#039;s most well-known baseball memorabilia collectors and experts. There have been a couple shows over the years and a few failed attempts at reconciliation, but as the two emcees and their DJ, Daddy Rich, approach the half-century mark in their lives, they&amp;#039;re giving it another go. &amp;quot;When you get to a certain age and you look at the nostalgia for what people call the golden age of hip-hop, you know, you only go around once,&amp;quot; Pete Nice (real name: Peter Nash) told me. &amp;quot;A lot of people have been calling for it for a long time. We&amp;#039;re just at that juncture in our lives, where if something is going to happen, now is the time. Before I&amp;#039;m really using a cane.&amp;quot; Nice and Serch&amp;#039;s colorful history is a Behind the Music in the making. Emerging from Brooklyn&amp;#039;s fertile hip-hop underground in the late &amp;#039;80s, they toured Europe with Public Enemy, made two gold records (1989&amp;#039;s The Cactus Album and 1991&amp;#039;s Derelicts of Dialect), and became one of Def Jam&amp;#039;s top acts before they imploded from relentless infighting. Along the way, they endured tragic deaths of friends, waged hip-hop warfare with other white rap groups (Vanilla Ice and the Beastie Boys, most notably), and survived legal and financial hardships.  &amp;quot;There was a genuine desire and need for all of us to get back on stage and see if we can still rip,&amp;quot; Serch (real name: Michael Berrin) explained recently. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been trying for years to do something but Pete&amp;#039;s schedule or my schedule or Rich&amp;#039;s schedule didn&amp;#039;t line up. Now we&amp;#039;re at a point in our lives where our schedules line up and we can make this happen.&amp;quot;  They recently played two reunion shows \u2014 one at a festival in Indiana and another in Brooklyn \u2014 and are planning a U.S. and European tour this winter to mark the 25th anniversary of The Cactus Album, a groundbreaking beat-and-rhyme fest that rivaled the Beastie Boys&amp;#039; Paul&amp;#039;s Boutique in its unbridled sampling experimentalism.       The record&amp;#039;s dusty grooves feature Nash&amp;#039;s intricate street rhymes and Serch&amp;#039;s wise-cracking party raps over funky loops and snippets jacked from everyone from The Doors to Steve Martin to James Brown and even the Beastie Boys themselves. The album spawned their biggest commercial hit, the Prince Paul-produced &amp;quot;The Gas Face.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve always had a chemistry,&amp;quot; Nash explains. &amp;quot;We just jelled and had a good rapport on stage... Even at the point when we hated each other, on stage you would never know.&amp;quot; On their second album, Derelicts of Dialect, they upped their persona as protectors of true hip-hop culture, taking aim at pop stars MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. They struck chart gold again with the anti-commercial rap anthem &amp;quot;Pop Goes the Weasel,&amp;quot; fueled by a video that featured a Vanilla Ice impersonator (played by Henry Rollins) getting a beatdown.  &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#039;t as if we were some outsiders that came in and tried to jump on the bandwagon. We had paid our dues,&amp;quot; Nash says. &amp;quot;We respected the music and knew that it was black music and paid the proper respect and didn&amp;#039;t clown with it. I think people saw that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think hip-hop is about race,&amp;quot; adds Serch. &amp;quot;What it is about is people who respect the culture and respect where the culture came from. Because if you lose that base, you lose what the culture is, which is a voice of the people in the streets.&amp;quot;  The last true 3rd Bass track was the grimy theme song to the 1992 Cuba Gooding flick Gladiator, which came out just as they finished a tour with Cypress Hill and split up. Both cite &amp;quot;personal and creative differences,&amp;quot; along with growing disdain from two years of living on the road. In classic hip-hop fashion, they each released a solo album: Serch&amp;#039;s Return of the Product and Pete Nice&amp;#039;s Dust to Dust, both of which did respectably. Neither achieved the success of 3rd Bass and Nash moved on to other things. He says he was pushed over the edge by the death of his friend Subroc, of the rap group KMD, who was struck by a car crossing a highway. &amp;quot;At that time you could say I was soured on the music business,&amp;quot; Nash remembers.  Serch and Pete Nice didn&amp;#039;t talk for several years until some mutual friends brokered a peace talk and they and Daddy Rich all agreed to play the Woodstock &amp;#039;99 festival. After that show, they released a new track in 2000 called &amp;quot;Hail to the Chief,&amp;quot; but plans to make a new album were scrapped as all three retreated to their busy lives. Daddy Rich, who Nash calls the &amp;quot;best DJ in the world,&amp;quot; recently sent them a new beat they used in their recent reunion shows, but the two middle-aged emcees say no new music is planned. A remastered re-release of Cactus, however, is in the works and may include unreleased music.  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if the passion and the need is there for Pete and I to get back in the studio,&amp;quot; Serch explains.  Serch says they may play Cactus in its entirety on the tour, as they join a busy hip-hop nostalgia circuit that has seen successful recent runs by Geto Boys, Pharcyde, LL Cool J, De La Soul, and Public Enemy. While plans continue to unfold, all three are continuing their lives outside of 3rd Bass.  Serch recently locked down a deal to host a CBS daytime talk show set to debut in select markets later this year. Daddy Rich lives in Arizona and runs an HVAC business. And Nash co-owns McGreevy&amp;#039;s Third Base Saloon in Boston \u2014 a baseball museum-meets-Irish pub \u2014 with Dropkick Murphys singer Ken Casey. Nash is also a voracious baseball historian, author, and documentarian who runs haulsofshame.com, a blog that outs fraud in the baseball memorabilia business. &amp;quot;Maybe with Serch&amp;#039;s new TV show, we&amp;#039;ll go on as the dysfunctional 3rd Bass family,&amp;quot; Nash joked. &amp;quot;They can have Dr. Phil come on and analyze us.&amp;quot;       Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a25215/3rd-bass-reunion-1013/>