(16) Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, “It Takes Two”
EDGED
(4) Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me with Science”
290-286
AND WILL PLAY IN THE ELITE 8

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 3/23/23.

CAMELLIA-BERRY GRASS ON “SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE”

The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids and [other-than-human persons] are inert.

—Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

In the music video for “She Blinded Me With Science,” a bunch of men dressed in British academic tweeds and formerly-starched shirts—the smell of pipe tobacco practically redolent even through the distance of time and YouTube—all gallivant in the yard of Thomas Dolby’s destination: the Rest Home for Deranged Scientists. The first of these burnt-out, gone-mad men of science that we see is a dude on the roof of the Rest Home, with a Wile E. Coyote ACME catalog-looking jetpack strapped to his back, looking shifty and nervous, wearing a white vest and grey slacks. I was reminded of this figure the other day on Twitter, when I saw a discussion thread populated by a few “anti-degrowth socialists” who were insisting that we don’t have to abandon economic growth and forward progress despite ongoing anthropogenic climate change, no, all we gotta do is hold out until its viable to mine our solar system’s asteroid belt for rare minerals.
The data, the evidence, the climate and energy Science! all add up to that political position being naïve (to put it kindly)…so why do I feel like the loony one? Why does pleading with others to take seriously the crisis of collective action that imperils all of us make me feel like I’m the one alienating my colleagues and neighbors? This isn’t even the first time I’ve made such pleadings in an essay for March Xness. I imagine readers already clicking the button to vote for “Ship of Fools,” already tired before I’ve reached my second section, before I’ve played my lil tricks that you know are coming, before I’ve laid out the course of my thinking. The eyes glazing over. This is all in my head, I am aware. Or am I.
The thing is (and please read this with a Dolbyesque growl): I can hear machinery! I know why I have been made to feel this way, I know what lights the lamps so to speak. I can detect the rhetorical emissions from the persons and the structures that would deny me truth. I know why I have been made, purposefully & deliberately, to feel crazy.

*

The extent to which we don’t know shit about consciousness is unreal. “Unreal,” of course, being common parlance for something that doesn’t comport to reality. “Reality,” of course, being a consensus rooted in knowledge derived from the scientific method. It was a good thing while it lasted. Scientific consensus reality, I mean. A valiant attempt. The mechanistic turn has produced lots of statements that we call knowledge. Plenty of workable, viable models. It’s also produced, in tandem with capitalism and the nation-state, a presently-ongoing mass extinction. But hey! We know so much about brain chemistry! Or so we think.
I’ve become friends with a tree. We’ve built a bond over shared songs, drinks, time. We’ve grown close and almost entirely nonverbally. We both show each other our care and our growth. We both let others speak through us. We see each other eye to eye, branch to branch, and through it all I better know the cycles, the feeling of pollination.
I moved to my present neighborhood in June 2020, fresh off of my entire world being ruptured and also the pandemic. I positioned my bed next to one of the two windows in my room, with not so much a “view” of the tall sidewalk tree out front as much as a scope. Its tendrilly branches wash the whole window in yellow-green, and when the breeze swirls through off the Delaware River the leaves stroke and scrape against the wire screen; a caress. An oaken exfoliation.
Sawtoothy, as I like to call them, is a Sawtooth Oak. I love their long, jaggedy leaves. Dense & fibrous & a little pokey, like dangerous tea. They are shaped like a wyrmtongue, like a child’s crayon drawing of a fire, like a black sheep banana leaf. I love their lil acorns nestled under their canopy of stamenic sproutings.

*

Thomas Dolby’s 1982 one-hit wonder is full of microhooks and sound loops to latch onto. It has this sense of early 80s playfulness to it that it ties so directly with, as British nutritional scientist and television personality Magnus Pyke keeps saying in one of the unlikeliest hooks in pop music history, Science! Pyke varies his line readings all throughout the song, from Science! (flat, as if cursory) to Science! (way too enthusiastic) to “She BLINDED me…with Science!” to She blinded ME with science” to “She blinded me WITH SCIENCE!” to Science! (exasperated) and Dolby himself sings the refrain—“She blinded me with science!”—with an intensity that ramps up through the video, as if to say I can’t believe we’re getting away with this and then he literally does say “I don’t believe it!”
All the while Dolby’s vanguard talent for working with synthesizers keeps layering on these warbling, major key noises that sound unhinged in a Looney Tunes way; undeniable earworms from cartoonish, nearly parodic clownsounds. Frankenstein beepboops and upward-lilting digital sax and janky, jaunty swinging quarter notes build up the sanatorial scaffolding that the song progresses through.
I spent most of 2022 housebound—in bed for the most part (avoiding any carceral equivalents of “Rest Homes”)—with various maladies from the long covid-complex. Tachycardia, joint pain, brain fog, a couple migraines each week. If I’m truly honest (and I wouldn’t be in an actual psych consultation, and if you don’t know why I’d protect myself then maybe that’s why I’m writing this essay), maybe some symptoms consistent with a functional disorder on top of that. I’m not trying to write about pain here. Or “psychosis,” and my efforts to avoid the psych ward, not really. I’m mostly just trying to write, trying to piece sentences together with a brain that runs clunkier than it used to. I mean to write about a small gratitude lining my bed rest in silver: the intersection of nonverbal communication and animism. This year I have really embraced my selective mutism. Even as a kid I’ve always had extensive stints of verbal silence, for which I learned to make masks after suffering through various corrective violences. I learned how to use my voice so effectively that it’s gotten me paid through teaching and through performance. But mostly I don’t like to talk out loud. So I wasn’t really doing Discord calls with people from my bed. I haven’t been teaching (not that that was my decision). My voice got to take a deep rest. And in that rest, I learned leaf language.
Sawtoothy doesn’t have vocal cords because Sawtoothy is a literal tree. But they speak to me in other ways, and I to them. They bridge me greetings from birds and squirrels and bees. We share the smell of incense burning by my open bedroom window. I sit on the sidewalk in the morning and share a cup of tea with them, pour water onto their roots. I place my palm onto their furrowed bark and focus my gratitude towards them. I believe that they receive it. I believe that they reciprocate it. My experience tells me as such. I’ve learned the sound of wind rustling through them, and how those sounds correspond to barometric pressure—which is to say I have learned to hear when Sawtoothy is warning me ahead of time about a low pressure system coming through & to prepare for joint pain. I don’t care that there’s working models for a completely materialistic, non-agentic lens to view our friendship through. You don’t know Sawtoothy like I do. Sawtoothy speaks to me and I know because I took the time to listen. We earned each other’s trust.

*

I have not disclosed to my doctors that one of the most important parts of my “support system” is a tree that I perceive in a real way as talking to me. I have not disclosed that I have been helped through some dark nights of the soul by other voices/presences/persons/spirits who I perceive as real. There is more here I could say, about the vast dismissal of persons who have developed post-viral complications and disabilities as a result of the sars-cov-2 pandemic and subsequent socio-governmental abandonment of said persons. About the dismissal too of the interiorities of transgender persons and autistic persons and plural person systems, of the gauntlet of fascistic legislation and fascist-sympathetic journalism that are imperiling so many persons whose interiorities defy mechanistic, “sane” understandings. The Clinic and I are at odds. I will not end up being done by the family and the state what they did to my aunt. Sometimes I deadly seriously, and in a sober, non-conspiratorial way, cannot just trust the science.

* 

Pardon the awful pun, but my experience with a tree is not the kind of interfacing with stem that our contemporary science education & scientific politics wants for us. It has never escaped my notice that the United States’ response to the climate science of the 2000s that broke through to the mainstream (Al Gore had a documentary! Rolling Stone reported on it all the time!) was to put the national pedal to the technocracy metal. President George W. Bush’s administration ushered in the “No Child Left Behind” era of educational policy, and along with it an overreliance on standardized assessment; this was followed in turn by President Barack Obama’s educational pivot towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) coursework and preparation for STEM jobs. That’s where the economy was experiencing growth after all, and so we accelerated the very fields and processes that were already throwing refined carbon emissions into the atmosphere like there was no tomorrow (which has helped ensure that there might not be a tomorrow, figuratively speaking, for global human order). Science and Technology have taken on a secular-religious position as sites of Salvation from our national sins. Even the left can’t shake this messianic vision of progress. You might recall if you’re a particularly online leftist the memes from a few years back about Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
I wonder when the modernist anxiety of obsolescence started. That fear of being left behind by the ever-progressing march of time. Was it before the [settler-]colonial projects of European empires? Or did it bubble up years later, after the ink dried on all those treaties and those nation-state constitutions, after the guilt started calcifying. Either way, there’s been no stopping that march, that drive forward into progress and growth. There’s been no rest, only being hit with technology—new breakthroughs that mean new ruptures and new growth spurts into the Future (or the Horizon or the Manifest Destiny or what have you).
    I told myself I was going to get through thinking about all this Science! without diving into the anti-psychiatry writings of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (your eyes, their glaze; I’m trying to look out for you, dear reader, dear Xness voter), but I simply have to bring to mind another of Guattari’s interlocutors here, Bruno Latour. Ever the critic of the discursive processes & structural limitations imparted upon his own fields of scientific inquiry (often by his own fields of scientific inquiry!), Latour was not soft about the deep changes that modernity brought to our understandings of time, and the lack of due reckoning about those changes. In his 1993 book, We Have Never Been Modern, he traces our cultural formations of mythologizing the motor vehicle, the plane, the space race, the early internet as inextricably modern story. A new conceptualization of time as irreversible (which it is) AND always progressing linearly (which it never did for pre-modern peoples, having a cyclic understanding of time). We now live in societies where the planned obsolescence of technology is needed in order to provide artificial ruptures. We’re desperate to turn the pages of the calendar, to get to the promised future, to free ourselves from earthly shackles, and I hope that between the lines here you can catch my drift, see how I’m placing parallel the rationalist, Protestant reformation and the scientific disenchantment of our world and lifeways. These things are literally inextricable. Can’t be left behind when the Rapture hits.

*

I often find myself these days asking what the point is of being a writer with all of this death, this drought, this soil erosion, this grand thanatos we call climate change. Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has been asking himself similar questions for years. In his excellent nonfiction work, The Great Derangement (which I discovered just a few weeks ago and on the happy accident of me trying to conceptualize the kinds of people who might make up a 2023 version of Dolby’s Rest Home for Deranged Scientists), Ghosh writes: “I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.”
Just as the tech industry boom has coincided with corporate personhood for oil companies with never ending multinational war with anthropogenic climate collapse, Ghosh points out that his beloved literary form, the novel, has failed to step up to the plate and address this collective endangerment. I would encourage you to read the book in full if you write fiction and/or if you find yourself wanting to imagine better worlds for us all. The novel too has its own anxieties about its own obsolescence, which arguably has already happened and is unable to accept as much.
    I ask you, reader, to take a leap with me (the established crazy person) here: if the mechanistic turn in the sciences—the disavowel of spirit, the small-making of consciousness, the figure of the Human (that is always-already a colonial positionality, an anti-Black product of the Christian great chain of being)—has made it so we as persons are structurally cleaved from kinship with the other-than-human life all around us, the life that we have been driving to extinction by our actions as a species alone, our landscape modifications and our foodways and our Capital-driven systems of extraction…if the mechanistic turn has caused us to do this, to be this? Then what fucking good is it?
I’m distressed too that the sciency-sounding language of therapy, somatics, & bodies keeping scores and such being universalized to all human persons is reifying a mechanistic detachment from our full, flourishing selves. Some people are healed by these stories. Some aren’t. Those who aren’t typically find their resolve in traditional religious spaces. But what if those stories don’t work for you either? What if you can’t simply trust the science, even as you have faith in it? How does such a person find healing stories in such a polarized, captured culture?
    Back to echoing Bruno Latour, the point is not to abandon science (or technology). Its not to return to pre-modernity (as if that’s even possible). No, we need new sites of scientific knowledge production. And these new sites, if they don’t want to render themselves obsolete as well, need to incorporate a plurality of diverse knowledge practices, and that includes the animistic traditional knowledge of indigenous persons that our fields of Science! built themselves up to dominate and overcome. You and I, reader, were born and raised in a context where science has meant necessarily mechanism and progress. Our anxiety over being left behind? Arguably, fear and shame that we will experience what we inflicted on others to get here. Fear and shame of our own judgments rendered back at us. To quote Ghosh once more about it, “Obsolescence is indeed modernity’s equivalent of perdition and hellfire. That is why this era’s most potent invocation of damnation, passed down in an unbroken relay from Hegel and Marx to President Obama, is the malediction of being ‘on the wrong side of history.’”
What if we all made kin with some trees about it. As a starting point. Maybe that’d help us to not leave behind those of us who fell sick during a pandemic either.

*

The thing is, at the end of the day, even with all of my rooftop ravings, “She Blinded Me With Science” is probably just a song about sex. “Now she’s making love to me. The spheres are in commotion. The elements in harmony.” When the music video isn’t going for “look at the crazy people” laffs it is languishing somewhat pornographically on the cheekbones and seductive skirts of the Rest Home’s chief assistant, Miss Sakamoto. Magnus Pyke’s infamous creepy-boss line delivery, “Good HEAVENS, Miss Sakamoto, you’re BEAUTIFUL,” is remembered most “fondly.” But I’m rather taken with the imagery of Miss Sakamoto with the strings and f-holes of a cello painted on her back (otherwise covered in a long, dark dress), in an eerie, empty ballroom with black & white harlequin floor tile. Dolby—quite the attractive lil man himself, with his circle frames and wheatshock of nerd hair—is dressed in a white tuxedo, taking a cello bow to Miss Sakamoto and playing her. Even the video’s last silent film penny arcade title cards—“…and the Doctor…gets his come-uppance!” plays as a libidinal laugh (get it? Come! lol!). And this is good. It’s nice. We don’t get a lot of zany, wacky pop songs that are also erotic these days.
I’m not the biggest fan of Sigmund Freud myself, but his psychoanalytic ideas on libidinal sublimations are coming to mind here, now, at the tail end of this essay. For me the lyric that hits the hardest with respect to all these things I’ve been slantwise disclosing to you from my veritable leather chaise lounge is “When I’m dancing close to her (she blinded me with science, science!)/ I can smell the chemicals!” There it is: the mechanistic turn disenchanting even our eros. Sexuality as formula, reproducible results every time. X amount of pheromones plus Y amount of sensory confusion equals poetry in motion baby, yeah!
Do you even know why you’re attracted to who you’re attracted to? Have you truly thought about the erotic? I don’t mean things like “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” or somesuch concepts that emerged from the Clinic as a way to explain the irrationalities of desire in a supposedly mechanistic world. I mean your actual desires. What gives you that feeling like your stomach is expanding out and joining with the aether? Maybe you’re like me and you hurt yourself and you hurt people close to you because of how shut off you were made to your own desires. How the science (which you Trust!) tells you one thing about yourself and, all the while, socially reproduces a society in which everyone doesn’t know one thing about themselves (and calls “crazy” those who try to know & assert their knowledge). How it hits you with technology.

Camellia-Berry Grass is trying to live. Presently in Philadelphia, she is the author of Hall of Waters (2019, The Operating System). A 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize, her essays and poems have been widely published. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, and has taught most recently in the MFA program for creative writing at Rosemont College. She’s trying to blog more. Sawtoothy says “Hi!”

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).