05/24/2026
Rest in peace Rob Base ... 🙏🏾✨️💯 ...
"It Takes Two" and "Joy & Pain" will be heard forever! 🙌🏽🎶💪🏾🎤🎵🎧 ...
You have danced to this man's song your whole life and never once knew his face. Rob Base made "It Takes Two," the record that fills a floor before the first verse even lands, and he died Friday at 59 after a private battle with cancer.
Almost forty years of cookouts, weddings, roller rinks and block parties have run on his two minutes of work. Time you knew who that was.
Somewhere this weekend, that song came on. You know the one.
The horns, then that voice telling everybody right about now. And before the first verse even landed good, the whole floor was full.
That happens every weekend, in every city, at cookouts and weddings and skating rinks and backyards full of folding chairs. It has been happening for almost forty years.
This weekend it happened while the man who made it was gone.
Rob Base died on Friday, May 22, 2026, after a private battle with cancer. He was 59 years old.
Here is the strange thing about him. You have known his song your whole life, the way you know your own kitchen in the dark.
Most of us could not have picked him out of a lineup.
His name was Robert Ginyard. He was a Harlem kid, and the song you have been dancing to since 1988 came out of a friendship that started in a fifth-grade classroom.
That is where he met a boy named Rodney Bryce. They became best friends the regular way kids do, playing baseball, running the block, two ordinary boys from the neighborhood.
Rodney would grow up to be DJ E-Z Rock. And the two of them, together, would make a record that outlived almost everything around it.
But first they were just watching other people do it.
There was a group from around the way called the Crash Crew, and Rob and Rodney used to post up at the block parties and watch them work. Then the Crash Crew did something that landed like a thunderclap. They put out a real record.
"They came out with a record, and we looked at them and said, Wow, they came out with a record," Rob remembered years later. "If they can do it we can do it."
So they went and got it, the slow way. For a long stretch they did not even own equipment, so they went to a friend's house and borrowed his, over and over, until E-Z Rock saved up enough for one turntable, then a mixer, then finally the second turntable.
Rob bought himself a microphone. They were young teenagers practicing in a bedroom, getting ready for a stage that did not exist yet.
It took about two years of that before they were good enough to step in front of a real crowd.
Then came the two nights that changed everything.
They were at a friend's house again, going through a stack of records, the breakbeat kind that every DJ in the city owned. They pulled one and stopped cold.
It was a little sn**ch of drums and two voices, a singer named Lyn Collins and James Brown, tossing a yeah and a woo back and forth on a 1972 song called "Think (About It)."
"We heard the sample and we was like, Whoa, I want to use this," Rob said.
They blended it with another piece of music, carried it into the studio, and watched the whole thing fall into place fast.
"It all came together like magic," he said. "It wasn't really hard to do. It came together. It was like magic."
The record was basically finished in two nights.
He named it "It Takes Two," off the Lyn Collins line. And almost right away, people in his ear told him that woo and that yeah were too much.
Take it out somewhere in the middle, they told him. Give people's ears a rest.
Rob would not move an inch. "I had to fight and say, Nah, we got to keep that in the whole record," he remembered. "That's got to stay in there."
He was right, and it was not even close. That looped woo and yeah became one of the most recognized sounds in all of party music, the piece a whole room hollers back without anybody asking them to.
He knew exactly what he was building. He did not want a rap song that only worked at rap parties.
"I wanted a record that could go anywhere," he said. "I just wanted to be able for the song to be anywhere."
He found out it had worked on a regular afternoon, sitting at home with the radio on.
Back then a rap record almost never got played in the prime daytime hours. So when "It Takes Two" came through his speakers at four o'clock in the afternoon, Rob understood instantly what it meant.
"I jumped up right there and started screaming," he said.
After that, the song was simply everywhere he turned. He would walk down his own Harlem block and hear it spilling out of a stranger's car.
"Everywhere you go the record was on," he said. "You walk in a store, the store's playing it."
The thing crossed all the way over into the pop Top 40, which a hard rap record almost never did in 1988. It pulled hip-hop and house music together and helped drag both of them straight into the mainstream.
In 1989, Spin magazine published its list of the hundred greatest singles ever made. They put "It Takes Two" at number one.
Now here is the part most people never learned.
Rob Base never had another hit anywhere near that size. There were other solid records, "Get on the Dance Floor" and "Joy and Pain," and a solo album the next year, but nothing else ever climbed that same mountain.
It did not have to. That one song, he said plainly, set him and E-Z Rock up well enough that he never had to work a regular job again.
So he did the thing a lot of people quietly look down on and almost nobody really understands. He spent decade after decade out on the road, on the throwback tours, walking out to perform that same song night after night after night.
And he did it while watching the world hand his credit to somebody else.
For years, a famous producer's name kept getting stuck onto "It Takes Two," in articles and in plain conversation. Rob had to keep sitting in interviews, calm and patient, correcting the record.
It was him, E-Z Rock, and a man named William Hamilton in that studio, he said, and nobody else was anywhere near it. He had made one of the most sampled records in the history of American music, and he still had to fight just to keep his own name on it.
That is the quiet ache running underneath all of this. The song belonged to everybody. The man who made it stayed half-invisible the entire time.
And then it stopped taking two.
Rodney Bryce, DJ E-Z Rock, died in 2014 from complications of diabetes. He was only 46.
By then the two of them had long since drifted into separate lives, the way old partners do. But they had never stopped being friends, and they had never stopped being those two boys from the same Harlem classroom.
"That was my best friend for all the years," Rob said.
He kept performing after he lost him. He kept walking out alone to those crowds, doing a song with the word two sitting right there in the title.
But he never really walked out there alone. He carried his friend with him onto every stage.
"When I'm onstage I feel like he's there with us," Rob said. "I always feel he's there with us."
And the crowds never once thinned out. That seemed to be the thing that amazed Rob the most, right to the end.
Forty years past that radio afternoon, he would look out from the stage and see young people who had not been born in 1988, who had not been born in 2008, mouthing every single word back at him.
"They know the song word for word," he said. "That's amazing, to see the young kids come up."
His record had done exactly what he built it to do. It went anywhere.
It went into car commercials and movie trailers, into songs by Snoop Dogg and the Black Eyed Peas, into a Target ad that opened on a kid buying the album, into stadiums and skating rinks and a thousand wedding receptions. It went onto ESPN compilations and into basketball arenas at halftime, a record that simply refused to get old.
It went into the future, into rooms Rob would never stand in, into the hands of people who would never know his face but would always know exactly when to shout the woo back.
On May 18 of this year, Rob Base turned 59. He marked the day the way a lot of us mark ours now, with a short and simple post.
"Happy 59th Birthday to me," he wrote. "God thank you for allowing me to see another year."
Four days later, he was gone.
His son, Rob Ginyard Jr., wrote the goodbye that said everything there was to say in the fewest possible words. Sleep in peace, dad. I love you.
So somewhere this weekend, that song will come on again. The horns, the voice, right about now.
And the floor will fill the way it has always filled, because that is what his two minutes of work has always done.
The only thing different now is you. Now you know whose two minutes that is.
Robert Ginyard, out of a fifth-grade classroom in Harlem, who fought to keep the woo in the record. And the woo is still going.
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