Continuing the somber theme of Memorial day, we had another hip hop legend pass away over this past weekend that I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge.
Continuing the somber theme of Memorial day, we had another hip hop legend pass away over this past weekend that I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge. Robert Ginyard aka Rob Base died on May 22, 2026, four days after his 59th birthday due to cancer. Born in Harlem in 1967 during the decade when the neighborhood was still processing the wreckage of urban renewal and the departure of the middle class, he grew up in the thick of the culture that would become hip-hop, met his future partner Rodney Bryce (aka DJ E-Z Rock) in the fourth grade, and spent his early years running with groups called the Sureshot Seven and Cosmic 3 MC's before the two of them figured out what they actually were together. Their first single, "DJ Interview," came out in 1986 on the World to World label. Nobody outside Harlem heard it:
Two years later, with a distribution deal from Profile Records and a record built around a vocal sample from Lyn Collins' 1972 funk track "Think (About It)," they made one of the most recognizable songs in the history of popular music, and the conversation about Rob Base never fully moved past it. That's a shame. The record after "It Takes Two" deserves a longer look than it usually gets.
The thing about "It Takes Two" is that it did something specific that tends to get lost when it gets filed under "party classic" and forgotten about until the next sporting event or TV commercial. The record crossed over by being equally credible on the hip-hop block and on the dance floor. It hit #36 on the Hot 100 in 1988, went platinum, peaked at #3 on the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, and got played on radio stations that generally did not play rap. Rob Base and E-Z Rock were operating at the intersection of hip-hop and what was starting to be called hip-house, the fusion of New York rap aesthetics and Chicago house music's dancefloor mechanics, before that intersection had really been defined as a thing. They helped build the road.
The immediate follow-up was "Get on the Dance Floor", released later in 1988, and it actually outperformed "It Takes Two" on the dance chart by hitting number one for two weeks in January 1989 and peaking at #11 on the R&B singles chart. Club kids would tell you it is a better pure club record than "It Takes Two" though it rarely gets thought of as part of Rob Base's legacy within the hip hop world:
"Joy and Pain" came out as the third single from the It Takes Two album in 1989, built around a sample of the Maze featuring Frankie Beverly song of the same name. It was a choice that was either very brave or very naive, given that Frankie Beverly is one of the most protective artists in R&B history when it comes to his catalog. Beverly came after Base legally, which generated the kind of bad press that metastasizes into rumor and derailed some of the momentum the duo had built. Despite that the record still reached the Top 10 on the dance chart and #11 on R&B:
By 1989, DJ E-Z Rock had stepped back from the duo due to personal issues, and Base went solo with The Incredible Base. The timing was bad as the legal trouble over "Joy and Pain" had preceded the album, the momentum was gone, and a solo debut without E-Z Rock's presence felt incomplete to a lot of people who had loved the duo format. "Turn It Out (Go Base)" from that period was a club hit that demonstrated Base was still capable of putting out a hit with his partner, though it didn't reach the same level of popularity by any means:
The duo reunited for "Break of Dawn" in 1994, a cleaner-sounding record that showed both of them had kept up with where hip-hop and dance music had gone in the intervening years. By that point the window had mostly closed commercially, but the record holds up as a document of two guys who still knew exactly what they were doing, and as a sidenote I believe it sampled the Isley's Between the Sheets a couple of months before Big Poppa came out and made it synonymous with Bad Boy:
DJ E-Z Rock died in 2014 at 46, from complications related to diabetes. It Takes Two is 37 years old and still sounds like a room full of people who decided to have the best possible time. By the raw metrics, Rob Base is one of the most successful artists in the history of hip hop. The asterisk is that almost all of that success flows from a single song, which unfairly creates the impression of a narrower legacy than his actual catalog supports.