Rob Base Only Needed the Beat and a Microphone

The beat of his song “It Takes Two” was to hip-hop what the guitar solo from “Stairway to Heaven” was to rock. Rapper Rob Base has now died at the age of 59.

“Yeah—Woo!” That’s how simple it can be to make music history. Rob Base and his school friend DJ EZ-Rock from Harlem were in their early twenties when, in 1988, they wanted to quickly record a demo for their record label. They sat together and dug through old records: Rob Base liked Think (about it) by Lyn Collins, a funk song produced by James Brown in 1972; EZ-Rock liked the beat of Set It Off, an electro track by Strafe from 1985; and both of them liked the intro to Space Dust by the Galactic Force Band. They sampled their favorite parts from the three records—including that “Yeah—Woo”—and Rob Base wrote a few spontaneous rhymes on top: “I’m not internationally known/But I’m known to rock the microphone.”

That’s how “It Takes Two” came to be, and the fact that he was “not internationally known” was about to change very soon for the rapper whose given name was Robert Ginyard. What the guitar solo from “Stairway to Heaven” was to rock, the breakbeat from “It Takes Two” became—as the Rolling Stone once put it—to hip-hop.

The two musicians had only hoped to land a local hit and maybe crack the New York hip-hop radio shows that aired late at night in those days. That’s how small the genre still was, even in the city of its birth. But then Rob Base suddenly heard his song on daytime radio—hip-hop could be pop, too—and “overnight” his life had changed, as he later recalled about the summer of 1988.

“It Takes Two” conquered New York first, then the rest of the country, and became one of the most influential songs in recent pop history. Over 200 songs—from Snoop Dogg to Mac Miller, from Missy Elliott to the Black Eyed Peas—that have either sampled or interpolated “It Takes Two.” The house music DJs from Chicago sampled it in the late eighties, just as the European producers behind Technotronic did in the early nineties. First HipHouse, then Eurodance: the sound of the 1990s is also built on “It Takes Two.” The two school friends from Harlem had, in one fast session and without thinking too hard about it, invented a hit formula: a quick beat to dance to, a catchy hook to sing along with—”It takes two—to make a thing go right”—and nothing more.

In 2008, the network VH1 included “It Takes Two” on its list of the 100 greatest hip-hop songs; for the Rolling Stone, it is one of the 500 greatest songs of all time. In the United States alone, it has sold over a million copies. To this day, “It Takes Two” can be heard at baseball games and in video games, in films and TV series. In a scene from the film The Proposal, it is sung by Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Rob Base once said he was especially pleased about that, having read that his song was part of the soundtrack to Sandra Bullock’s youth. “One day,” he hoped, he would surely meet Sandra Bullock.

Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock landed two more hits at the time (“Joy & Pain” and “Get On the Dancefloor”), then ran out of ideas. EZ-Rock, born Rodney Bryce, died in 2014 from complications of diabetes. Rob Base, however, kept touring across the United States right up until the end, alongside other musicians who shaped the sound of the 1990s—Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc, and yes, even Milli Vanilli.

He had to fight for his legendary “Yeah—Woo” sample before release, Rob Base told the Rolling Stone two years ago on a podcast. The sample appeared far too often, he was told; he should cut it back. Rob Base didn’t listen. The sample runs through his contribution to pop history from start to finish, and it is precisely through its endless repetition that it generates the energy you can still feel today when you put on “It Takes Two.”

The story of this song also speaks to why hip-hop was so fascinating back then: you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument to make music. All it took was a few ideas, a sampler, two turntables, and a microphone. And the chutzpah to put it out. As Rob Base raps on “It Takes Two”:

“My name is Rob, I gotta real funky concept
Listen up, ‘cause I’m gonna keep you in step
I got an idea
That I wanna share
You don’t like it? So what, I don’t care.”

Rob Base died on last Friday at the age of 59, surrounded by his family, of cancer. If there is a hip-hop heaven, then the two childhood friends from Harlem—Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock—are reunited there now. It takes two to make a thing go right!