3OH!3

Repping Boulder like it’s the dirty South, 3OH!3 has made its way from college-party joke band to radio superstar with its Billboard chart-riding album, 2008’s Want. After a slew of homemade singles like “Holler Til You Pass Out” made the rounds on the Internet, the act ended up on the Vans Warped Tour, and the rest is MTV history. Though the last thing the world needs is another Beastie Boys, it’d be selling 3OH!3 short to write it off as another group of white kids trying to co-opt rap. True, Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte are a couple of white kids who rap, but 3OH!3’s heavy, ugly, hilarious music owes as much to metalcore and electro as it does to Master P. The duo continued its success with last year’s Streets Of Gold, which features a guest spot from the similarly polarizing Ke$ha.

Updated 07/20/2011