Tommy Boy's Greatest Beats, Vol. 3

A big part of the fun of homemade mix tapes is solving the geographical riddles: how to get from track 2 to highly dissimilar track 5 while making musical sense in the segues. Judging from the disparate items on volume 3 of Tommy Boy's Greatest Beats series, the programmers must have had a blast. For instance, they get from Coldcut and Lisa Stansfield's housed-out "People Hold On" to Paris's smoldering "Break the Grip of Shame" in a matter of three tracks--specifically, Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage," Club Nouveau's Why Do You Treat Me So Bad," and DU's "Same Song," which features 2Pac clowning around with the (Digital) Underground. There are more clunkers on this volume than on others in the set, but the high-wire acts in the mix tend to hide the flaws well. --Martin Johnson