first round

(16) Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, “It Takes Two”
blew the mind of
(1) Toni Basil, “Mickey”
242-186
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/23.

Oh Mickey You’re So Fine: carolyn kellogg on Toni Basil’s Fadness and the cruelty of the 80s

A hot guy stands with scissors in his hands. He’s at the jukebox, the top open. Usually he uses  the back end of the scissors to push the button that gives us free plays. Not this time. This time, he reaches inside and pulls out a vinyl 45. We are screaming Wait, no, no! behind him. Ignoring us, he puts a point of the scissors to the record and carves a triangle, a circle, a square, again, all the way around. He returns the 45 to its place, closes the jukebox lid, walks away. S follows him but I stay there, reach for my change, drop it in the slot. The needle starts, skips, lifts away. “Mickey” never plays again.
Rewind a little and he had said something like, Please do not play that song again. Or, Stop playing that song. Or, Play that song one more time and see what happens.
Pull the camera back and you’ll see we’re in an ice cream shop, The Latest Scoop, a pun suitable for small town 80s America. Romeo’s, a pizza place, is right next door. Going down the street: banks, the thrift store One Flight Up, the Chocolatier, the Ioka movie theater, an electronics store, a Woolworth’s, further down, the Loaf and Ladle, a ‘70s throwback I can rarely afford.
Pull the camera back and up and up to take in the clusters of brick buildings up the rise. That’s where S and I go to school. There is probably snow on the ground. We’re allowed to come to town, but few people have made the habit of it that S and I have. We’ve been spending a LOT of time at The Latest Scoop. We have played “Mickey” many, many, many, too many, times.

Antonia Basilotta was raised in Las Vegas, the child of a Vaudeville performer mother and orchestra leader father who had a gig at the Sahara Hotel. She did cheerleading at Las Vegas High (this detail will be important later). Jump cut ahead into the 1960s and Toni Basil has begun a career as an actress and choreographer and avant-garde filmmaker, including a short featuring Dean Stockwell. 
She started out dancing on film, in “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (with Frank Sinatra) and “Viva Las Vegas” (behind Elvis). Living in Los Angeles, she did choreography in the dreamy early-mid ’60s — Basil was an assistant choreographer on the music-variety television show “Shindig!” and choreographer on “The T.A.M.I. Show,” the two-day concert released as a single film in 1964. Legendary, iconic pop music.
As the scene started changing, getting trippier and darker, Basil was right in the thick of it, appearing in the delightfully bonkers Monkees movie “Head,” co-written by Jack Nicholson. She was friends with both him and Dennis Hopper, acting in “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces.” She dated Jay Sebring and knew Sharon Tate, both killed by the Manson family in 1969. If there is a little bit of a gap in her biography after this, it might be because things got pretty fucked up. It also could just be that her credit list is so long, the early ’70s don’t make the grade.
By the time I was playing “Mickey” too many times, I was in my second year at the vaunted high school and finally finding my feet, a little. People who came for all four years were exceptional (by our own measure), gluttons for punishment (by everyone else’s), and somewhat doomed (yearbooks recorded the names of all the four-year students who hadn’t made it to graduation, about a third of the class). That I was still there sophomore year—we had a different name for it, like all prep schools, but I’ll translate—that I was still there was a minor accomplishment. 

I’d gotten to school by being one of the smartest in my small New England town—I was never the smartest, but I was, clearly, the most eager to leave. At boarding school, almost everyone there was wicked smart; we openly, vocally compared test scores in the dining hall. During my classes, I was still considered good at math, but otherwise, I was middle of the pack. If I was lucky. 
On the first day of French class, Monsieur V started by asking us to introduce ourselves and—I’m not sure if this was according to his prompt, or just how the answers started coming back—how long we’d spent in France. An annual visit. Grandparents in Paris. Every other summer. Just got back. Did I mention this was in French? It was in French. 
I had never been to Paris or Europe or even Canada. My one semester of smalltown junior high French was barely enough for me to follow the conversation, let alone keep up with the coursework. I didn’t give up, I just sucked. A few months in, Monsieur V called on me to read a homework exercise aloud in class, which I realized I’d gotten entirely wrong. There were I think 12 sentences, all to have been executed properly. He made me read the first and then correct my own errors, live. He did not call on another student. I had to read the next sentence, fixing it, and then the next, and the next. By the end, I was weeping. I don’t think he thought it was cruel; I just needed to see that I was not meeting expectations.
I was no longer anywhere near the smartest. But I hadn’t left. I started my second year in the fall of 1982. I made some cool friends. I joined a preppy sport. I did theater. The pieces didn’t fit together all that well—my persona was malleable. Scrawny obnoxious teen, I guess.

The single “Mickey” by Toni Basil was released in May of 1982 in the U.S. and the video caught fire, with Basil, a 38-year old uncanny valley cheerleader, surrounded by actual teenage cheerleaders, outdancing them all, wearing a mask of glamor makeup, gloriously kitschy, playful, fun. Incredibly, she’d made the video before MTV was a twinkle in the eye of basic cable. 
Basil recorded “Mickey” for a British label, Radialchoice. It was a gender-flipped a cover a glammy 1979 pop song, “Kitty” by British band Racey. In some ways, the two songs sound a lot alike—but they don’t really, because Basil added those cheerleading chants: “Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!” Brilliant. There’s also an amped-up beat with the stomping, clapping cheerleaders. Basil turned a simple pop song into an unforgettable anthem.
In “Mickey” lore, there are slightly different versions of what happened next. Either her British label asked for, or Basil decided to create, a video to promote the song, because European late night was playing this kind of thing, or because Basil wasn’t going to tour live—something like that.
As a choreographer, Basil had been toying with the idea of doing something with cheerleaders. She was struck by how much cheerleading had evolved since she’d been one in Las Vegas 20 years earlier. (Although she could still fit into her uniform—she’s wearing it in the “Mickey” video.) Although the British label was nonplussed, not having cheerleaders in England, Basil was far away in Los Angeles. “The record company was in England and they barely ever showed up,” Basil told Lyndsey Parker at Yahoo Music last year. “They sent me money and said, ‘Have a great time, man.’” 
She knew what she wanted. She got members of the Carson High champion cheerleading squad to perform in the video with her. Basil conceived, choreographed and directed the music video for “Mickey.” Against a white background, six cheerleaders do tricks around Basil, who sings (well, lipsyncs), kicks, turns, and dances. 
In the 1970s, Toni Basil had teamed up with Don “Campbellock” Campbell, a dancer who’d performed on Soul Train, along with several others, to form The Lockers, a street dance troupe. They booked live shows and TV gigs, from The Carol Burnett Show to Saturday Night Live, popularizing locking as a dance form. You’re not imagining things—Basil is locking in the “Mickey” video.
“Oh Mickey you’re so pretty you don’t understand,” Basil sings, “you take me by the heart when you take me by the hand.” Basil is calling him pretty. She’s inverting the power dynamic. “It’s guys like you Mickey. Oh what you do Mickey, do Mickey, don’t break my heart Mickey,” she sings, turning the lyrics of a kind of rapey song into something that’s teasing, a game where she’s in charge. Those chants! Those cheers! Hey Mickey!
The record label Chrysalis picked up “Mickey” for its American release, because it was getting British airplay, after hearing the import single played on local radio, or possibly both.
Basil gives delightful and candid interviews but I have not been able to pry loose from any of them exactly how the video for “Mickey” found its way to MTV. 
The network famously launched in August of 1981, but wasn’t widely available. “Mickey” as a single was released in May 1982, and hit #1 on the Billboard charts seven long months later, the week of December 11, 1982. MTV most definitely propelled “Mickey” to its spot at the top of the radio charts, a video made before the network existed that was a perfect distillation of what people watching wanted. 

It is laughably impossible to try to explain how hard it was to see music videos in those days. My parents didn’t get cable until 1986. Not that they refused to pay for it—it physically didn’t go that far. 
But somehow in the small town where I went to boarding school, cable made it as far as the electronics store. I try to imagine what the owner was thinking: he sold TVs, he sold stereos, of course he should sign up for cable. Maybe—I could be inventing this, but maybe—there was a wall of TVs with TVs tuned to different stations, playing video cassettes, and he put the cable on one. Did he tune in to MTV? Somebody, some student, stopped to watch. I think I remember that, standing on the floor, watching.
What I know for sure is the store had a listening room, a glass-walled room in the back for showcasing high end stereos and speakers. And very soon, in what I now realize was a kind of miracle, the electronics store owner moved a TV into that glass room and turned it to MTV. There were no chairs in the room. That was fine with me. I sat on the floor for hours. For hours and hours and hours. I knew the names of the DJs and loved “99 Luft Ballons” in German and realized if they teased a new video premiere in the next hour, it would come in the last 3 minutes. I was mesmerized. Other people came and went, but a lot of times I was there the longest.
I had my homework with me. I did try to pay attention to it.
The chronology, I know, is all mashed up, old memory style. I probably saw “Mickey” when it was first being broadcast on MTV—I’m assuming they had it on heavy rotation in the fall of 1982, before it charted. I fell immediately in love like I fell for all kinds of new music, new wave music, music that was fast and loud and got as far as my remote corner of the culture. But I don’t know for sure when the electronics store implemented their teen-friendly MTV room. 
Why on earth did the owner do it? Maybe it was kind of a Hail Mary. He started selling records, and I bought some, when I could. I had to save up. 

I was earning I think $2.15/hour at a time but maybe less, working in the dishroom in the dining hall on campus. It was a messy job that left you either splattered with food left on the trays coming in, or blasted by scalding water from the dishes coming out. It was one of the few, possibly only, jobs left to kids like me who didn’t qualify for financial aid, but otherwise would have no way to buy snacks or do laundry in town or play a video game. There weren’t a lot of us. Most people had allowances.
S, who had come to school as a sophomore, was not wealthy but had an allowance, I think. She’d come from a small town upstate and as ’82 became ’83, as we were listening to “Mickey” too much, she was on a solid trajectory from “newcomer” to “pretty and popular.”
With my friend S, I didn’t spend time in the stereo store but down the street at The Latest Scoop. The shop had ice cream, the jukebox, and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade game. And two brothers.
The hot guy worked at The Latest Scoop—he had strong shoulders and muscles that would flex when getting ice cream and dark hair and a mullet, god bless him. He was gruff with us at first but warmed up. And he was joined by his cute younger brother—smaller, flatter hair, a mean edge. The longer we spent there, the nicer the hot guy was, popping open the jukebox and giving us free plays.
S was more mature than me—I know “mature” is a code word for boobs, which she had, but she also had a self-possessed sexuality. This was all the more improbable because she looked like a grown-up Little Orphan Annie: tight red curls, turned up nose, freckles. A weirdly sexy adult Little Orphan Annie. (Ugh, that’s probably a porno). I was still gawky, obnoxious.
At some level I knew I was a cover, a ruse—S needed someone there while she flirted with the hot guy, as if it was my idea to get all that ice cream or visit the brother who was not amused by me or play endless games of Ms. Pac-Man (which, to be fair, I got quite good at). She would officially deny it, but the hot guy was S’s boyfriend.
So when we had that argument about “Mickey,” when we (really me) had been playing it over and over on purpose because I loved it but also to be annoying, when the hot guy took it and destroyed it, it wasn’t about the record. He didn’t really care about the song or that I was obnoxious, things he’d been tolerating for a while. It’s that he was losing S. If she’d been singing that song to him before, she wasn’t anymore. S was moving forward on her popularity continuum, and that didn’t include dating him. 
What I didn’t understand then, what took me years to understand, was that what I was missing—in French class, in finding a grubby job, in the path I took through the school—was privilege. I had enough to get there, but not enough to fit. 
S understood it, or at least intuited it. When you get to boarding school, level up. Don’t get a job—get invites to richer families’ summer homes, ski vacations, Park Avenue parties. The hot guy would have been a catch in her hometown. Here, he was just a townie. 

“Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind. Hey Mickey! Hey Mickey!” Because she had worked on the Monkees movie Head, some people have assumed Toni Basil’s “Mickey” is drummer Mickey Dolenz. She says it is not (Wikipedia refuses to believe her).
And she knows what some people are thinking when they hear the lyric “So come on and give it to me, any way you can / Any way you wanna do it I’ll take it like a man.” “People also think ‘Mickey’ is about butt-fucking!” Basil told Vulture in 2012. Basil says, “NO! That’s ridiculous. Everyone reads shit into everything. It’s not about anything dirty.”
In addition to her iconic pop hit, Basil’s long career in choreography has probably imprinted you more than you realize. Collaborations with the Talking Heads and David Byrne, Bette Middler, Tina Turner, David Bowie, choreography in American Graffiti, That Thing You Do, Legally Blonde and Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood. She’s won stacks of awards. She lives in Los Angeles and still dances every day. 

Carolyn Kellogg is a writer, lover of old houses and former books editor of the LA Times.

The Situation that the Bass is In: david griffith On “It Takes Two” and the Birth of the Author

For the first 47 years of my life, I believed that Mike Ginyard, aka MC Rob Base, was celibate.
In 1988, when Base and his childhood friend DJ EZ Rock’s, single “It Takes Two” dropped, I was thirteen and did not know of anyone, besides, the adults in my life, and maybe Tanya, the hot as hell sixteen-year-old daughter of my paper route client, Mr. Yarbrough, who was having sex.
And so, every time I listened to “It Takes Two” in the basement of our split-level ranch in Decatur, IL, on my father’s capable system—Pioneer receiver with 5-band graphic equalizer, JVC CD player, with a hand-built 70s HeathKit turntable, and Pioneer speakers with 15 inch woofers—the line “...don’t smoke buddha can’t stand sex [sic], yes…” struck me funny.
The only people I knew that did not have sex on principle were the priests and nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and I would come to find out years later that I was even wrong about that.
I was naive about a lot of things—was thirteen-years-old and living just off a cul-de-sac in the heart of the heart of the country in the Soybean Capital of the World—but especially sex and drugs. It wasn’t hard for me from context clues to understand that “buddha” was weed, but the syntax and flow of the line “don’t smoke buddha, can’t stand sess, yes” made it seem these were separate activities. Like, don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
Thanks to Urban Dictionary, now I know that “sess” is short for sensimilla, a word that I actually did know (even back then) due to uncles who exposed me at a young age to CaddyShack:
“This is a hybrid,” groundskeeper Bill Murray lisps. “This is a cross of Bluegrass, Kentucky Bluegrass, Featherbed Bent, and Northern California Sinsemilla. The amazing stuff about this is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon, take it home and just get stoned to the bejeezus…”
At thirteen I had yet to smoke (or drink) anything that would send me into an altered state, unless you count RC Cola, but I was discovering that music did something to me—for me.
I had been playing trombone since the 5th grade and had just that year joined the Mound Middle School jazz band, led by Mr. Jim Walker, a balding, spectacled clarinetist, who led a Dixieland group that played street festivals and wedding receptions. Somehow, amidst all the distractions of middle schoolers playing grabass, Mr. Walker taught us the rudiments of swing: “Doo-va-Doo-va-Doo-va-Doo-va,” he would drone, tapping his foot, and twirling his index finger, coaxing us forward into that new musical, alchemical idiom in which two eighth notes become a dotted eighth, sixteenth.
There are times even now, 35 years later, that I will spontaneously begin singing the melody to Glenn Miller’s “A String of Pearls” or Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings,” big band standards that groove with a deceptively deep, almost tidal force.
And yet, for all my exposure to some of the swingingest, most danceable music ever written, dancing is not something I did. My family, nor any family I knew, did it. Maybe my dad would have a little too much Cold Duck on Christmas Eve and would get to bouncing around and twirling my mom, but that was it. We were Midwest Catholics (my mom was actually raised Seventh Day Adventist, a sect that frowns upon dancing) with no strong ethnic identity—some Irish, some Welsh, some German and Dutch—but not a high enough concentration of any of these to influence the food laid on the table, or our holiday rituals.
In the absence of these influences, I was a blank slate. I would lay on my back on the basement floor and listen to Zeppelin and Edgar Winter albums from my parents collection but also a stray Donald Byrd fusion album, and a completely whacked out Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album with a cover featuring battle tanks in the shape of armadillos; I sang in the choir at the Methodist church because that’s where many of my friends worshiped; I did a brief stint as a trombonist at our Our Lady of Lourdes because the music director discovered a Vatican II hymn that squarely ripped off Brubeck’s “Take Five” called “Sing of the Lord’s Goodness,” which was excruciating because all I could imagine while playing was the angelic, crystalline alto sax tone of Paul Desmond.
But by far the biggest influence on my sense of musical possibilities was my neighbor, Chip. Chip was 4 years older, had Tony Hawk bangs, and a fake radio station, WPIG, in his basement.
WPIG was basically a podcast 30 years before podcasts were a thing. We had a whole crew of guest DJs: my younger brother would sometimes show up and be allowed to choose a few tracks, Chip’s girlfriend, who I would later date after Chip went off to college, appeared on mic a few times under the alter ego Lois Lane—even my friend Cory, whose voice and reporting now regularly appear on National Public Radio, had a cameo.
Each show took up the space of a 90 minute cassette. Most of the 90 minutes was music, but what made it different from your run of the mill 80s mixtape was that we would take turns introducing the tracks in our best, most sincere imitations of the slacker college radio DJs broadcasting from the local WJMU: And that was [long pause] 10,000 Maniacs [long pause] “About the Weather,” I would say in a high pubescent voice, trying desperately to sound world weary.
Every third or fourth song there would be a recap: You…just…heard INXS “Mediate,” the Beastie Boys “Brass Monkey” and [long pause] U2 “Bullet the Blue Sky…” There were segments where we read articles directly, verbatim from Rolling Stone or gave a run down of the Top 40 albums, but there were also skits and interviews with invented characters from the neighborhood, like the hard of hearing Granny Fudrucker, played by my brother, in a caterwauling dragged-up Terry Jones falsetto.  
It was in the summer of 1988, in Chip’s basement, WPIG station headquarters, that I first heard “It Takes Two.” By that time, the song had already peaked. It spent 3 weeks in the top 40 beginning in mid-April and then spent 19 weeks slowly sliding down the top 100, but continued to hold steady on the dance charts through 1989, ascending as high as number 3. In 1989 Spin magazine ranked “It Takes Two” as the no. 1 single of all time. In 2021 Rolling Stone ranked “It Takes Two” no. 116 on its “Top 500 Best Songs of All Time.” Eventually, it would be certified Platinum many times over.
I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just knew it was unlike anything I’d heard before.
It’s one of those songs, like Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” or George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” or Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” where there’s a rhythmic tease, a few bars to set the tone; a little prelude to get your attention. But the first several bars of “It Takes Two”--a sample from the Galactic Force Band’s 1972 “Space Dust”--isn’t so much a tease as a pronouncement; it’s giving prelude to a grand space promenade; like you’re at a block party with hundreds of people: grills are smoking, the sun is beating down, everyone is out and looking good; everything and anything is possible, and then, out of nowhere a portal in the sky opens and this synth fanfare erupts, but not one of those soaring, medieval fanfares with piercing trumpets, but a bottom-heavy, descending line pulling you down, pulling you in like some kind of trance-inducing deep space transmission, like some kind of tractor beam; something you’ve heard and felt standing wedged between Galaga and Space Invaders in the crowded mall arcade. You just can’t place it. No one can. But before you can think a voice enters your consciousness, a voice that has been there since before time, waiting. The booming voice of god speaks the song into existence:

RIGHT ABOUT NOW…NOW…NOW
YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE POSSESSED

[A platform bearing two men in tracksuits—deus ex machina style—lowers them to the stage]

BY THE SOUNDS OF MC ROB BASE
AND DJ EZ ROCK…ROCK…ROCK…

HIT IT! 

The basement was carpeted and had a low drop ceiling. At the far end, just outside the laundry room, was a tiled dance floor backed by a mirrored wall, so without even trying, the acoustics were bright without being muddy, like the school gyms where Chip and I would later DJ. The bass hummed in the tile and shimmied in the marbled mirrors, sending vibrations up through my feet, into my chest and teeth. It was a good, alive feeling.
And that was just the first 12 seconds of the song.
What follows is one of the most memorable downbeats in music history: a low frequency bass kick that cannot be produced on any actual acoustic instrument because it’s not a sample—a digital recording of an actual drummer playing an actual kick drum—but a completely synthetic sound created by the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The beat hits, then rumbles—sound engineers call it “decay.” Only the 808 has that specific kick and decay; a gauzy thud, like a  heartbeat.
And then, we all know what happens next, a funky, janky, clattering Mardis Gras march of synth snare, hi-hat, and clap track:

Whoo! Yeah! Whoo! Yeah!
It takes two to make a thing go right
It takes two to make it outta sight

I didn’t know it at the time, but these few bars snatched from Lynn Collins’ 1972 feminist funk-soul hit “Think (About it)'' is one the most famous and most sampled breakbeats in all of hip-hop. It’s hard to hear, but down there underneath all that synth is Jabo Starks, the drummer for the JBs, James Brown, the Godfather of Soul’s, backing band
Starks’ meticulous 8-on-the-floor style isn't showy. He was known for holding it down so others could be free. JB bassist Boostie Collins and trombonist Fred Wesley have both said as much. “I could just blow free,” Wesley said in one interview. Starks’ impeccable groove-making allowed others to not just be fully themselves, but the confidence to transcend their limits.
Which is exactly what Rob Base does when he finally begins to rhyme:

I wanna rock right now
I'm Rob Base and I came to get down
I'm not internationally known
But I'm known to rock the microphone

Because I get stoopid, I mean outrageous
Stay away from me if you're contagious
'Cause I'm the winner, no, I'm not the loser
To be an M.C. is what I choose 'a

Ladies love me, girls adore me
I mean even the ones who never saw me
Like the way that I rhyme at a show
The reason why, man, I don't know

So let's go, 'cause
It takes two to make a thing go right
It takes two to make it outta sight

The circumstances in which I first encountered “It Takes Two” are comically different from the circumstances in which the song was created: Decatur, IL, a sprawling prairie city (47 sq. miles), population 94,000; Central Harlem, over 100,000 people crammed into 1.4 square miles. But what was similar is that the late 80s was a time when everyone was learning how to copy, sample, and remix. I didn’t own turntables or a mixer, like DJ EZ Rock, or even any LPs of my own, but I had a dual cassette deck hooked up to a CD player and a brick of blank Maxell tapes, a VCR and a closet full of Kodak brand VHS tapes with bright orangey yellow labels. I made mixtapes for friends and, later, girlfriends. I learned to program our VCR so that I could record episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which came on every Saturday night at midnight on the local PBS station.
For a school project on Romeo and Juliet, my buddy Joe and I figured a way to connect two VCRs together to create what we considered to be masterpiece of video art, in which we intercut video of our classmates performing scenes from the play with clips from Yo! MTV Raps and Python-esque interludes in which we referenced inside jokes from Late Night with David Letterman.
When we weren’t making fake radio shows we were taking Polaroids of ourselves skateboarding and then cobbling them together into a handmade zine, employing the photocopier in the business office of the local Kmart, where Chip’s dad was the manager. There we taped the Polaroids to pieces of paper, captioned the images with a Sharpie and then laid them against the warm glass, a process that turned the washed out color photos into grainy gray-scale tableaux depicting me and my brother and Chip ollying off curbs and leaping from (unseen) stacks of landscaping ties to create the impression of catching massive air, a la the Tom Petty “Free Fallin’” video.
This is all to say that I grew up making copies of things, sampling things, then stitching them together with other things. But I did not grow up dancing.
There was a lot of chin out head nodding, eyebrow raising, and maybe some slight up and down shoulder action, and toe tapping, but otherwise the arms, legs, and hips did not get involved. Dancing always seemed so risky, so deeply personal—so visible. The copying and sampling and stitching and dubbing was out of sight—all anyone saw was the finished product. They didn’t see me sitting in my parents basement late at night obsessing over the sequence of songs, worrying whether the selections were too bald, my emotions and intentions too easy to spot.
This all changed with “It Takes Two.” Prior to that summer, the big hip-hop hits weren’t things you could even play at the Mound Middle School dances. I mean, there was LL’s “Going Back to Cali” and Kool Moe Dee’s “Wild Wild West,” songs you could hear on the radio, songs that even our teachers would admit to knowing, but we all knew the real stuff wasn’t for public consumption. I’m talking NWA, 2 Live Crew, Too-Short, Ice-T, Slick Rick, even Public Enemy was seen as too political. 
If you wanted to listen to any of that you had to know someone who could drive—an older brother or sister, or a neighbor, and then you could catch a track or two while catching a ride home from school, take in lyrical scenes and situations that my white, Midwestern, thirteen-year old self had never even dreamed.
But in the end, the lyrics weren’t the thing that stuck with me—it was the beats and the bass pulsing through my back, rattling the windshield and trunk lid. This wasn’t the Bronx, where hip-hop and Rob Base were born, or Harlem where he moved in 4th grade, met DJ EZ Rock, and first heard the Crash Crew playing at block parties, this was Montgomery Hills, Decatur, IL, a quiet warren of hilly, curving streets punctuated by cul-de-sacs. There were no block parties, no one used their porches or stoops for anything more than pumpkins and rustic benches that no one ever sat on. No, the music was confined to basements and cars—stereos that were only played loud when parents weren’t home, kicker boxes locked inside the trunks of Honda hatchbacks, volume turned down when we rounded the corner into the neighborhood.
“It Takes Two” was an exception. It played well with others, and not plays well with others in a palatable Fresh Prince way, but in a way that brought generations together. I remember my mom, a Baby Boomer, who came up with the Mamas and the Papas, James Taylor, and the Moody Blues, coming down into the basement, catching the beat, bobbing her head, and half joking, half not, shouting along with the “Whoo! Yeah!” break.
At the time I didn’t know where that sample came from, but I have to believe that my mom, who graduated from college in the early 70s would have known Lynn Collins’ “Think (About it).” Maybe she recognized it, maybe she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters was that it made her move, made her shout.
Flash-forward a few years to post-football game dances in the galleria of Stephen Decatur High School, and “It Takes Two” became the great leveler of the dance floor. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just the cheerleaders and the pom squad out there doing “Da Butt” or “The Percolator” which required a startling, cold-sweat inducing level of coordination and ass-moving. Rob Base had come to democratize the breakdown. When he commanded us, on the count of three, to “1, 2, 3…Get loose now!” We all listened. It became something we could all do—we needed to do—a welcome release from the 1-2, 1-2 foot shifting of slow dancing to “Running to Stand Still” or Sinead’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
The popularity of “It Takes Two” shouldn’t be so much of a mystery, and it definitely shouldn’t be seen as a fluke, or a fad. What Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock did was tap into the very essence of hip-hop itself: Only fifteen years earlier, August 11, 1973 in the Community Room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc, an eighteen-year old immigrant from Jamaica did something no one else had done before. He’d been watching the crowds at dance parties, and noticed what got people on the floor were the breakbeats, the funky, groovy instrumental sections between choruses. So, DJ Kool Herc, using two turntables, like the disco DJs in Manhattan (to keep an uninterrupted flow of music going), began mixing together just the breakbeats: a break from James Brown’s “Give it Up or Turnit Loose'' would slide into “Bongo Rock” by the Incredible Bongo Band, then back to Brown, and then over to Babe Ruth’s flamenco guitar inspired “The Mexican.”  The result? A dance party where the DJ kept the audience guessing, finding more and more unexpected combinations of rhythms, and flavors, and genres, which led to more people on the dance floor and, eventually, later, a method of laying down a rhythmic foundation for MCs to rap over. Herc called this the “Merry-Go-Round.”
“It Takes Two” doubles down on the “Merry-Go-Round” technique, looping Lynn Collins’ “Think” (“Whoo! Yeah!”) break over and over and over throughout the track, then layering on top an 808 confection: A deep bass hit on the one and a clap track pattern that is a direct rip-off of the 1984 disco sensation “Set it Off” by Strafe, a beat that all but obscures Jabo Starks’ snare and hi-hat, so while you can’t hear it, you can feel it down there.
Which is what makes “It Takes Two” so singular, so itself, a classic, not some gimmick. If you really listen you can hear and feel all its antecedents; all the layers of rhythm. You can hear the whistle of the drum major summoning the band in the Mardi Gras parade. You can hear the hi hat and snare of Jabo Starks, who grew up in Alabama listening to the loose but military style of the Mardi Gras parade drummers. You can hear the tambourine from the original Lynn Collins track, and on top of that—doubling it— the ricocheting high hat and clap track of Strafe; all these generations, motivations, and situations of sound on stage at once.
In other words, what makes “It Takes Two” so infectious, so readily, irresistibly danceable, is that it’s basically a five minute long Frankenstein’s monster of a breakbeat.  
Again, I say this all as though I knew it then back in the summer of 1988. All I knew was what it did to me; how it made me move my shoulders from side to side; how it put a hitch in my hips; what the bass did to the air around our bodies.
But there’s more.
In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone—four years after DJ EZ Rock’s death—Rob Base revealed that the creation of “It Takes Two” took place over the course of one night in a studio in Englewood, NJ, right across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. They didn’t have an album yet or a record deal, so their manager told them: “Yo, we need to get in the studio, knock out a song or whatever.”
And so they did.
They started listening to records, throwing around ideas, eventually putting on Ultimate Breaks & Beats Volume 16, the latest installment in a series of albums put out by Bronx DJ “Breakbeak Lou” Flores for use by other DJs, in which he compiles jazz, funk, and rock tracks with especially tasty, groovy, funky, or original sounds and beats. Side one of volume 16 features tracks by the Commodores and Marvin Gaye. Side two, as luck would have it, features Lyn Collins’ “Think” followed directly by the Galactic Force Band’s “Space Dust.”
Rob Base told Rolling Stone: “Basically, it’s just like, it was right there. The hit was right there in our face. And we just took it.”
It was right there, and we just took it.

That fall, my 8th grade year, Chip started a DJ business. Not exactly his business partner, I was enlisted to help schlep equipment and page CDs and cassettes. I only really remember one gig: a dance at John’s Hill Middle School, and those memories are vague and dark: a steamy gym, the smell of Drakkar Noir, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” and Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” But what I remember clearly is the moment when I pressed play on the CD player and that godly voice filled the room: “Right about now…”  There were screams followed by dozens of tweens in pegged jeans sprinting from the dark edges of the gym onto the dance floor. Up until then I had been a spectator, but at that moment I became hooked on the power of making others move their bodies. 
Now, nearly thirty-five summers later, I am clearing the fog from the bathroom mirror and preparing to shave my face. “It Takes Two” is blaring from the iPhone on the back of the toilet tank. 
As I lather my face, I begin to move and rap along, “...my name’s Rob, the last name Base, yeah, and on the mic I’m known to the freshest…” and as I bring the razor down my jaw I think of Chip. I haven’t seen him since—I have to think really hard on this—the summer of 1996 or 97, but we’re Facebook friends, so I know he's out in Portland and a DJ.
I’m thinking of him because last night as I was writing I wondered if he had any of our old WPIG tapes—I have one, but can’t find it anywhere—a casualty of so many moves.
And so I messaged him on Facebook: 
Hey, working on this thing about “It Takes Two” and WPIG…You have any of those tapes still? And to my surprise, he responds: Have to take a look.  
A few minutes go by and a photo pops up in the chat box. It’s Chip’s hand holding a vinyl copy of “It Takes Two.”
A few more minutes go by. Chip writes back: Damn. I think any tapes that old got melted in my apartment fire in Decatur in the 90s…
I return to the keyboard and re-read all that I’ve written. I am having that spectator feeling again. All these words and sounds are just sitting there on the page pointing to something, pulling me toward something: a desire to be both in my body and loose of it.
I get up from the table, walk to the stereo, and push play on the CD player: 

RIGHT ABOUT NOW…NOW…NOW…

I turn the volume up as loud as I can stand it. My old speakers crackle a bit, but then settle in. 

YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE POSSESSED…

I’m looking for that exact frequency. 

BY THE SOUNDS OF…MC ROB BASE…AND 

I want to feel it again for the first time—in my feet, my chest, and teeth.

DJ EZ ROCK...ROCK…ROCK…

HIT IT!

Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull).