second round

(16) Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, “It Takes Two”
EXTINGUISHED
(9) David Foster, “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire”
354-161
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16

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 3/16/23.

WE WERE IDIOTS ONCE, AND YOUNG: AMORAK HUEY ON “LOVE THEME FROM ST. ELMO’S FIRE”

This essay is not about the song you probably think it’s about.
You probably think this essay is about John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” a glorious keyboard-heavy exemplar of 1980s inspiration pop that soared to the very pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1985. It was the main theme from the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, the song people remember from that movie, the one people assume you’re writing about when you mention to them what you’re writing about for Xness this year.
If I were writing about that song, I’d expect it to make a run in this tournament. It has all the ingredients, the right blend of nostalgia bait and the kind of dated self-importance that allows us to look back on it with both wistful pleasure and the intellectual superiority that comes from knowing you’ve matured beyond such trifles from your past. The song and the movie—they remind us of who we were and make us feel smug about who we are. But John Parr was not a one-hit wonder. A one-memorable-hit wonder, perhaps (with, I guess, apologies to “Naughty Naughty”), but “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” was not his only venture into the charts, making that song ineligible for this year’s competition.
This essay is about the movie’s other theme song: “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire” by David Foster.
All the pomp and bombast, none of the lyrics. It’s not the only instrumental song to hit the Billboard charts—its rise likely buoyed by Vangelis’ wildly popular “Chariots of Fire” theme from just a few years earlier, America at the time I suppose in the mood for lofty keyboards and videos full of movie clips—but it’s certainly in relatively rarer company.
The thing about this particular instrumental song is that, listening to it now, here in the 2020s, nearly four decades after its release into the wild, is that I can’t hear it. Not as itself, not as a standalone piece of music. Instead, I hear the movie—or at least how the movie made me feel. Even though the two songs sound nothing alike, sometimes when I’m listening to Foster’s, I forget and think I’m listening to Parr’s. Which I guess is the point of a movie theme, right? To evoke the movie without overshadowing it. In that regard, this song does its job perfectly—a tidy, radio-friendly three minutes, thirty seconds of saxophone and keyboards that remind me how pretty and angsty the Brat Packers were. Forty years later, that remains the exact effect of the song, at least if you’re around my age and recall that movie with a combination of fondness and chagrin.
So, let’s talk about the movie. I thought I was going to be clever and open this essay by noting how St. Elmo’s Fire was, to me and my Gen X cohort, the middle installment in a trilogy of guides for what to expect from life, falling between The Breakfast Club and The Big Chill. Turns out that exact observation was the lead to Janet Maslin’s review of the movie in The New York Times upon its release in June 1985. I learned on Wikipedia that one of the producers of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire called them “Little Chills” from the start. Oh, well. Nostalgia is like that—memories you think of as individual are, it turns out, collective. And vice versa. Experiences you imagined were universal are quite likely to have been specific to you, or least your demographic.
If you’ve never seen the movie—and it doesn’t seem like one that has had much of a life beyond its original Gen X audience, no Zoomer cult following on Netflix or anything—the quick recap is that it’s about a group of college friends going through all sorts of melodramatic turmoil upon graduating from Georgetown. It stars core Brat Packers Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Andrew McCarthy. It’s fine. Or it’s terrible. I don’t know. It wasn’t very well reviewed at the time, but everyone I knew saw it, and saw it more than once. I don’t even remember how—was it in heavy rotation on basic cable? Did we rent it over and over from our neighborhood video store? I know I bought a copy of it on VHS at some point, one of those “12 movies for a penny if you sign up for our monthly club” deals. However we managed to get a hold of it, when I was in high school in the few years after this movie came out, we’d all watched it and taken it to heart and thought it had something meaningful to teach us.
Something you have to know about us, though: we were idiots.
By “we,” I mean me and my friends specifically, but also maybe every other young White person chasing fading upper-middle-class dreams in Reagan’s America.
Some 1980s comedian had a bit that my friend Mark and I used to (and still do) quote to each other all the time about how when you look back at yourself from five years ago, you inevitably realize what a jerk you were back then—and when you consider the implications of that, it means you’re a jerk right now! Man, I would tell my younger self, just wait until you’ve been having that same realization for forty or fifty years. Knowing you’re an idiot doesn’t really make you less of an idiot. Maybe that’s the Gen X curse—self-awareness without the accompanying ability to make that awareness useful.
Watching St. Elmo’s Fire now, it’s clear that the movie knows exactly what it is. It’s slick and pretty like its youthful stars. It’s shallow and overwrought on purpose. The characters aren’t nice to each other, and they’re not especially likeable, and they behave terribly. They are rich and White and ridiculously privileged, and their lives are just so hard, the world so unfair — and that message was like catnip for us, the teens who weren’t so pretty as Hollywood stars, not so rich as Georgetown graduates, entering high school with the sense already that we’d come along too late, already being labeled as the Slacker Generation, not so hard-working or patriotic or pragmatic as our Boomer parents or Greatest Generation grandparents. Even the name Brat Pack was a reminder of the gap between us and our predecessors—Judd Nelson was no Frank Sinatra. Like I said, we were idiots. But when you’re fifteen or seventeen and someone tells you the world sucks, what a relief—a lifesaver tossed to help you deal with the turmoil and trauma inherent in that age.
My sense of St. Elmo’s Fire as offering a primer for how to transition into adulthood is not something I’ve superimposed with the benefit of hindsight. It was very much an explicit part of how I watched the movie at the time. My friend Mark and I found our analogues in the movie — he was Emilio Estevez’s Kirby, I was Andrew McCarthy’s Kevin. This is, to be blunt, embarrassing. In the movie Kirby’s main trait is that he’s pursuing (to a degree that is so stalkerish even a movie from 1985 has to acknowledge it) an unavailable love interest, and in eleventh grade, Mark had a crush on an unavailable girl from our trig class a grade above us. To Mark’s credit, he is really nothing like Kirby, and didn’t do anything untoward because of his interest in the girl, certainly nothing resembling stalking. We just talked about her a lot, and maybe he eventually asked her out once?
To my, well, less credit, I might have been more like Kevin than it feels good to admit. In the movie, Kevin is a mopey aspiring writer in love with Ally Sheedy’s Leslie (who’s in a relationship with Judd Nelson’s Alec; I told you it was melodramatic). I was definitely mopey, and I already wanted to be a writer. I didn’t so much have an unrequited crush on a particular friend’s girlfriend—it’s more that I had an unrequited crush on everyone. This is one of those nostalgic feelings that I’m not sure how universal it is—the sense that I went through years of my life as this ball of yearning and hope and undirected want and unfulfilled ambition based on ideas from the movies. That description seems to apply to both my nonexistent teenage love life and my life as a writer ever since. If I was Kevin five years ago or thirty-eight years ago, I’m Kevin now. Like I said: embarrassing.
Back to the song. David Foster was no stranger to hits—he was part of plenty of them as a producer, a writer, and a studio player for acts like Earth, Wind, and Fire, Chicago, Toto, Boz Scaggs, the Tubes, Kenny Loggins, and others. Rolling Stone labeled him the “master of bombastic pop kitsch.” As a solo artist, “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire” was his one venture into the charts, and maybe that’s appropriate—it’s a near-perfect distillation of an entire thread of 1980s pop, no lyrics to get in the way of the soaring, a song intended specifically to make you think of the word “soaring,” a song tied to the move it’s named after, inseparable from the film and its cultural associations. It’s sort of a perfect one-hit wonder, in other words. I don’t expect it to make a deep run in this tournament because no one remembers the song on its own; maybe they remember the movie, or the movie’s other big song, but it’s hard to imagine having nostalgic associations for this song in particular. Again: the quintessence of a one-hit wonder, entirely a product of its kairotic moment, a song that could have been a hit at no other point in the history of the universe.
It’s a little weird that the song is called “Love Theme,” because the movie is not a romantic one. There are crushes that the characters mistake for love, to be sure, but the movie isn’t about love in any real way. The most generous reading is that it’s about friendship, and the particular intensity of friendship when you’re young, and how unsustainable that intensity is. Perhaps the one-hit wonder is a good metaphor for such friendships—burning hot, burning out.
After high school, I ended up going to the most Georgetown-like nearby college, but surely that wasn’t because of the movie’s influence on my expectations, right? Surely not. Anyway. Mark went there, too, and we were roommates, and our experiences were nothing like the ones depicted in St. Elmo’s Fire, except in all the ways they were exactly alike: hookups and breakups, intense friendships that fell apart, sometimes in melodramatic ways, right around graduation. Maybe the movie had lessons for us after all.
I mentioned earlier the comedian with the bit about looking back over your life and realizing that you’d been an idiot all along. I’m pretty sure that comedian was Richard Belzer—I could be wrong, but don’t correct me, in my mind it’s him and I’m okay with that even if it’s not verified. Belzer died in February, after I’d already written about that bit in the initial draft of this essay, but before I finished it. He was 78. That made me think about the Brat Packers. They’re older than I am, but how much older? I looked it up to confirm, and they’re all in the range of five to ten years older than me—old enough already that it won’t be an enormous shock when one of them dies, old enough already that if one of them dies tomorrow, people will nod and think, well, a little young but it makes sense. Which, you know, if people your age are that age, it means you’re that age. I didn’t mean to write about mortality, but maybe it was inevitable. Maybe that’s the lesson of a tournament of musical acts that peaked once and only once. Maybe we’re all one-hit wonders.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

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).