The Magic Number

The second song on the album, after the Intro, with Posdnuos and Trugoy rapping. It samples Bob Dorough's Three Is a Magic Number, takes its drums from Double Dee and Steinski's Lesson 3, itself a chopped version of John Bonham's break on Led Zeppelin's The Crunge, and drops in a line from Johnny Cash's Five Feet High and Rising, which gave the album its title. Mase and Prince Paul scratch snippets at the end. In the UK it reached number 7 and remains the group's highest-charting single there. Trugoy said in 2009 that with three people in the group, three being the magic number became the philosophy, but mostly it was just a song they loved. Posdnuos said in 2016 that it means a lot to him as a song about three friends who stuck through everything.

NME placed it at number 77 on its 2017 list of the 100 best songs of the 1980s. It closed Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, in the end credits, as a nod to the three Peter Parkers. It reached streaming services for the first time on 13 January 2023, ahead of the albums, with a 7-inch vinyl single, a cassette single and a digital download.