(16) Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, “It Takes Two”
finally ended
(10) Limahl, “The Neverending Story”
322-187
and will play in the final four

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 3/28/23.

FANTASIA ON THE DANCE FLOOR: LIMAHL AND MIRACLES OF “THE NEVERENDING STORY” BY ERIN KEANE

If you heard the song before you saw the movie, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in for a simple good time. “Turn around,” Limahl croons to the buoyant beat, drawing out the final vowel of the opening line into a gleeful run. “Look at what you see.” Giorgio Moroder, our Father of Disco, was onto something when he composed his “Never Ending Story” fantasy anthem’s shimmering flourishes, its soaring peaks and valleys carrying Keith Forsey’s lyrics like a flight on a Luck Dragon’s back. We needed this confection, a dose of misdirection from the anguish we will first endure.
Do you feel a twirl coming on? I do. I want to rush a dance floor in a storm of balloons, dedicate this one to my lost friends. When I dance, I always close my eyes. I can bring them all back that way.
“It’s still a song I play as a DJ and people still love it, especially the girls,” Moroder, that mad genius of timeless soundtracks, said in a 2018 interview. “The ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, they all heard the song when they were children. It stays in their head. They love it.”
When Beth Anderson layers in on, “Make believe I’m everywhere, I’m hidden in the lines,” it sure sounds romantic. That’s how Stranger Things season 3 sells it anyway, when, to coax a crucial piece of information out of his genius long-distance girlfriend Suzie, unlikely hero Dustin engages in this duet over a radio with all his skeptical friends listening in.
What do the girls—the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so—really love about this song? The movie set off a chain reaction for me: The NeverEnding Story raced a snail so Labyrinth could dance so The Princess Bride could joke so Shrek could ruin “Hallelujah” so Stranger Things could weaponize our fantasies into horror. Unlike later tracks Stranger Things pulled out of the crates of my youth, “Never Ending Story” is not an alienation anthem, as its big TV moment shared by two dorks in puppy love underscores. It presupposes connection, tapping into a feeling less retro and more like ancient, despite its disco-meets-New Wave sound. Like all of Giorgio Moroder’s big soundtrack hits—consider Blondie’s “Call Me,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—the song and the movie are impossible for me to separate. And so, no matter what age I am when I hear this song playing, it takes me back to a time before cool, when we were Childlike Empresses waiting open-hearted for our new names, or Atreyus on a quest to find Bastian, the one who could bestow them.
The singer, Limahl—he of the gravity-defying hair, the baby-soft features, the gentle seeking eyes, a perfectly safe gay crush for the ladies, let’s say 40 years old or so, to have tended in their girlhoods thanks to Wolfgang Petersen’s video—is a one-hit wonder only in the strictest sense of the term. Born Christopher Hamill before he gave himself a faux-exotic stage name, an anagram of his last name, Limahl was also the front man of the English band Kajagoogoo, whose lead single “Too Shy” off their debut album White Feathers rose to Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And then the band fired him. Over the phone. “I was absolutely betrayed,” he said in a 2019 interview. To be flying so high one minute, only to be left behind. It is a story any girl who has navigated the dumpster treachery of school feels hard.
And about a year later, Giorgio Moroder’s people called. When “Never Ending Story” broke through on the charts, it put Limahl in rare company. He became not a two-hit wonder, but rather a one-hit wonder twice over. I’ve by no means exhausted the research on this matter but it seems terribly difficult to do what Limahl did, to achieve one-hit wonder status as both a member of a group and as a solo artist. You could say CeeLo Green. You could get deep in the weeds on Dave Stewart if you pretended the Eurythmics didn’t exist. Safe to say it’s uncommon. You have to respect it.
Not that Limahl had a lock on the job. “Never Ending Story” is a bit higher than Limahl’s vocal sweet spot, and as he tells it, he partied the night before his audition and arrived hungover to Berlin where he kinda blew it at first. That’s the thing about second chances: We’re not always great at recognizing the door when it opens. Moroder, who knew what he wanted from a movie soundtrack theme, was patient, teased it out of him, and on the second try, Limahl nailed it. Two hits—one under Kajagoogoo, and one under his chosen name—should disqualify Limahl from a conversation about one-hit wonders, but if anyone knows the power something as simple as a name change can bring about, it’s The NeverEnding Story fans.
It's become common to look back on ‘80s movies for kids and wonder at the earnest, unfiltered emotional brutality of them, but it’s hard to say what an acceptable alternative would have been. We watched the things we couldn’t talk about and spoke in a shorthand collage that nodded to those indelible scenes. Parents for the most part were not our best friends. Who even had a therapist? The world felt strange and unknowable and adults acted like we couldn’t hear them talking. That scream of Bastian’s, the one that crossed dimensions? I heard it, too.
Step off the dance floor with me. Turn around. Look at what you see: An attic, jumbled with maps and skeletons and taxidermies, a secret hiding place at school where this average sad boy could hide from the world with a book that he swiped off a grumpy antiquarian who knew what he was doing. (If you don’t think you would have taken refuge in such an attic and let yourself be swept away into an epic tale by candlelight, I don’t think we can be friends.) Before this book, the average boy woke up next to the one he fell asleep reading. His dad is all business. This boy, Bastian, tells dad that he dreamed about his mother. Business dad doesn’t want to hear it. “We can't let Mom's death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?”
At eight, nine, ten years old I didn’t understand that dead parents are just a trope in children’s stories because otherwise there’s too much supervision, too much security, too much love. When my father died, I took those stories personally. Bastian and me, we were going through it. I understood all too well why he couldn’t bring his head out of the clouds. We knew there was no such thing as a story that never ends. It was midnight in the Howling Forest all day long, and we were supposed to give it our all, what, in gym class? I needed any refuge from the Nothing I could find.  
Turn the radio off for a minute. Sit down and watch with me. See the Nothing as it rolls in. It obliterates everything. Creatures large and small are on the run and their only hope is a champion named Atreyu, who will fight to save the Childlike Empress, the being whose energy powers Fantasia and who is losing that energy to the Nothing.
Turn around. Look at what you see: Atreyu is just a little boy on horseback, armed with a bow, his courage and an amulet designed to protect him. Atreyu is being asked to do something impossible, but kids are always being asked to do things that seem impossible at first.
We can't let the encroaching Nothing be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right?
How does the song go again? “Rhymes that keep their secrets / Will unfold behind the clouds,” Limahl and Anderson sing in ethereal harmony. Pull up a blanket. Find the matches, light the candles. Ration this sandwich as a hedge against the hunger. You probably know what time it is.
We have to talk about Artax, Atreyu’s horse and best friend, drowning in the Swamp of Sadness.
“Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.” The warning didn’t make it any easier to watch.
Turn around, Atreyu: Look at what you see. Artax is stuck, his own weight pulling him down. Atreyu tries to pull him out, but the muck is too strong, and Artax doesn’t have the strength.
“Artax, you’re sinking! Turn around!” Atreyu screams.
“You have to try. You have to care,” he pleads. He’s just a boy, sent on an impossible quest. This is our champion? Or, of course he is. He just doesn’t know what his real mission is yet.
Atreyu looks into the camera, tears running down his face. Cut to Bastian in the school attic who looks up from the book, tears streaming down his face. Cut to me as a child, watching for the first time, utterly unprepared to witness this. Atreyu, our hero, could fail? And Artax could sink while Atreyu walks out on his own feet? What was Artax carrying that Atreyu couldn’t see?
Cut to me now, watching again as an adult. We can’t let Artax’s death be an excuse for not getting the old job done, right? Tell me what we couldn’t see unfolding behind the clouds. Even Bastian and I, who thought we already knew what there was to know about how stories end, were devastated by the unfairness. Atreyu was wrong when he thought Artax was dying because he didn’t care enough. I hear Morloch the Mountain’s resigned sigh—“we do not care … whether or not we care”—not as apathy now but as the raw material that builds a defensive shell. But Morloch the Mountain is also stuck, that shell too heavy to ever lift into the air.
I will let Giorgio Moroder and Limahl in on a secret: If it weren’t for their song, then that moment—Artax in the swamp, Atreyu trying and failing to save him—would be the only thing, pretty much, I would remember about this movie. The story would begin in the swamp and end with Morloch, with Atreyu defeated, feeling it was all for nothing. It’s the song that helps me remember what happens next:
Atreyu turns around. He trudges back through the waters that claimed Artax with a wolf on his heels, and who should swoop down to save him from the swamp or the black dog or whatever we’re calling despair today but Falkor, the Luck Dragon. Look at what you see: Falkor is a miracle incarnate, made of all good things, both wise and innocent, fearless and tender, nurturing and fierce. If this song had a texture I could run my fingers across, Falkor’s incandescent feathery fur would be it. I can forget this as easily as I can forget how the film ends,  with Bastian soaring through Fantasia on Falkor’s back: In the beginning, it is always dark. That’s when we’re free to build.
Bastian shouts Moon Child’s name and becomes a champion; his scream across dimensions brings Artax and Atreyu back to life. Moroder gives Limahl a second chance at his audition, and he’s back on Solid Gold.
Years later, Limahl’s second chance had its own comeback thanks to Dustin and Suzie’s duet on Stranger Things. Charts look different now, and so does a hit: A surge in streams of “The NeverEnding Story” put it almost to the top of Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 chart, and YouTube demand for the video increased by 800 percent.
It is tempting to point to this resurrection as proof of the song’s timelessness, of it having earned its neverending status. But what if I told you it didn’t need a second life to prove its worth? Without Falkor, the swamp wins. Without the song to remind me of Falkor, all I can remember is Atreyu’s anguished witness, not Bastian’s eventual triumph. Look again at the name we gave the phenomenon of the singular hit. Consider what an honor it is to bear it. Wonder is another way of saying miracle, which is to say—for three minutes and thirty glorious seconds, before you beg the DJ to play it again—a mirror of your dreams.

Erin Keane is the author of RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (Belt Publishing), one of NPR's Best Books of 2022, as well as three collections of poems. She is Chief Content Officer at Salon and teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and professional writing in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. 

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.”
If there is a spirit to every age, then that might just be the spirit of the late 80s:
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).