Rob Base did not set out to change music. He was just looking for a good sample.
The Harlem rapper, born Robert Ginyard, died on Friday surrounded by family after a private battle with cancer, just days after his 59th birthday. His passing was confirmed through a statement posted to his official Instagram account, which described him as a loving father, family man, friend and creative force whose impact on an entire generation will not be forgotten.
He is best known as one half of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, the duo responsible for “It Takes Two,” a 1988 track that became one of the most recognizable songs in the history of hip-hop and one of the genre’s earliest genuine crossover moments.
How “It Takes Two” came to exist
The story behind the song is almost comically low-stakes for something that became a cultural institution.
Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock, whose real name was Rodney Bryce, had become friends back in the fourth grade in Harlem. By the mid-1980s they were making music together, releasing their first single in 1986 before signing with Profile Records in 1987. When they went into the studio to record what would become their defining track, they had nothing prepared. They were going through records at a friend’s house when they landed on a sample from Lyn Collins and liked what they heard. They went to the studio that night and built the song around it.
Rob Base later told Rolling Stone that neither of them expected it to travel the way it did. The first sign that something unusual had happened came when he heard it on prime-time radio. He jumped out of bed. In the late 1980s, getting a rap record on prime-time radio meant you had made it, and they had.
What the song became
“It Takes Two” climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot Dance/Club Songs chart and was later certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It crossed from hip-hop into dance clubs, reached pop radio and found an audience that neither genre alone could have delivered.
The track has since been sampled by Snoop Dogg and the Black Eyed Peas, appeared in the 2009 romantic comedy The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, and was featured in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004. It remains one of those songs that almost anyone, regardless of age or musical background, can place within the first few seconds.
Tributes from across the culture
Reactions to his death arrived quickly on Friday evening.
Comedian Dane Cook posted on X that Rob Base was internationally known and genuinely rocked the microphone, calling “It Takes Two” one of his favorite songs ever. NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders offered his prayers to the family and called Base a legend.
The responses reflected something true about who Rob Base was in the culture. He was not a constant presence in the headlines. He was something more durable: a person whose work became part of the shared soundtrack, the kind of song that shows up at weddings and movie trailers and sporting events and somehow still sounds fresh.
The partner who left first
DJ E-Z Rock did not live to see this moment. Rodney Bryce died in April 2014 from complications related to diabetes at the age of 56. The two had been friends since elementary school, built something together that neither could have built alone, and now both are gone.
Rob Base survived his partner by more than a decade, long enough to watch “It Takes Two” outlast nearly every trend that came after it.
What he leaves behind
The Instagram statement posted after his death put it simply. His music brought joy to millions. Beyond the stage, he was a father and a family man. His creative force, the post said, will never be forgotten.
Hip-hop has spent decades producing artists who chase the kind of crossover Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock stumbled into on a whim one night in 1988. Most of them never get there. Rob Base got there on the strength of a sample, a studio session with nothing prepared and a song nobody thought would travel as far as it did.
It still has not stopped traveling.
