There’s the guttural thump of the bass; the heavy, throbbing line that punctuates the slick electronic grooves that sweetly whine and meld with the hard-hitting voices of Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte. 3oh!3 is an electronic rap duo from Boulder, Colorado (which is in the area code that shares the outfit’s name). Their sound is abrasive and sexist, booze-fueled misogyny—music that’s at home on a lit-up dance floor. But the pair seems to inject a fair amount of levity in their image, less thuggin’, more tongue-in-cheek. Which is probably not a bad move: it’s not exactly the thugginest-life for a hip-hop group to be born out of two scrawny white boys who met in their college physics class.
3oh!3’s hit song, “Don’t Trust Me,” received exhaustive radio play (and was a FishCo favorite last winter). With the band’s newfound popularity comes a genre-shaking question: is hip-hop still limited to its current mainstay? 3oh!3’s success may be the new model for musicians outside the narrow tradition to make hip-hop music.
3oh!3 is not the first niche-defying ensemble. Bands such as the Beastie Boys, a Jewish hip-hop trio from Brooklyn, have had a great deal of success. But their rhymes are faux-feisty and self-conscious. And while they emceed about things like objectifying women—see “Hey Ladies”—the Boys are careful to make sure they never take their songs without a grain of salt; they know they’re out of their league here. And their early nasally rapping over their instruments (which they play with exceptional mediocrity) alludes to their hard-core punk roots. In other words, they gained a gait as a punk outfit before genre-hopping to hip-hop. And while their first hit single, “Fight for Your Right to Party,” is a catchy anthem for all impish 14-year-old boys, the group has evolved into a more electronic sound in the last decade—a precedent and a foundation for newly-emerging bands like 3oh!3.
What makes 3oh!3 different from the Beastie Boys and the like is that 3oh!3 is not ironically detached from the veracity of hip-hop—it is ironically attached. They are unapologetically rap-ruffians, with lyrics like “I got yo’ dogs on a collar, baller, so how you like that?” But they are not attached, whatsoever, to the current hip-hop scene. Like the Beastie Boys, 3oh!3 maintains a tenuous connection to punk rock—they’ve ripped up the Vans Warped Tour (twice now). And while 3oh!3 may be bursting out of the hip-hop box, they’re unlikely to get any real “cred” anytime soon. Especially if they keep touring with Katy Perry.
