![]() Instead, along with Paul C and his cousin Cool V, Biz produced the LP himself. Biz didn’t work with Marley on that album. But Biz was an outlandish figure, and his larger-than-life absurdity came through even on a song like “Vapors.” If you listen to that album, it’s clear that Biz cared about party-rocking above all else, and he got even better at it by the time he came out with the 1989 follow-up The Biz Never Sleeps. That album had the single “Vapors,” where Biz clearly presented himself as a serious person. Today, though, it feels like a footnote to the Biz’s original.ġ988 is also when Biz released the Marley-produced debut album Goin’ Off. “Just A Friend 2002” did even better on the Hot 100 than the Biz’s original. Thirteen years later, Mario, a teenage R&B singer from Baltimore, sang his own version of “Just A Friend,” and he had a career-making hit with it. ![]() Biz’s off-key roar makes “Just A Friend.” When a real singer tries it, the song just doesn’t have the same charm. Biz steered into it, dressing up like Mozart in the video, and the song went straight into the collective memory and stayed there for decades. That chorus was so bad, so good, and so full of personality that the world couldn’t help but take notice. I didn’t know I was in for such an event.”įor the chorus, which flips the hook of Freddie Scott’s 1968 sooth-soul nugget “ (You) Got What I Need,” Biz intended to bring in someone who could actually sing - probably TJ Swan, the Juice Crew-affiliated crooner who showed up on Biz tracks like “Make The Music With Your Mouth, Biz.” Nobody showed up the the studio, though, so Biz brayed out his own hook in a full-on drunken-karaoke atonal howl. ‘Yo, could you tell me where is door 3?’ They showed me where it was for the moment. “I was talking to this girl from the US nation.” “I asked her her name, she said, ‘Blah Blah Blah.'” “I have friends, and that’s a fact, like Agnes, Agatha, Germaine, and Jack.” “I arrived in front of the dormitory. The way Biz put words together made no sense, and it made all the sense - that elusive combination that we call style. But Biz was not a normal human being, and he found endearingly weird ways to tell a fairly straightforward rap narrative. Biz was rapping about a real-life heartbreak, about learning that a girl he’d been dating had cheated on him when she was in college. When Biz Markie wrote “Just A Friend,” the song that took him into the unexplored territory of the Billboard Hot 100’s upper reaches in 1989, he didn’t think of his single as a comedy song. But Biz Markie wasn’t like those other guys. The Fat Boys were, more or less, a vaudeville act. The Fresh Prince carried himself as a sitcom star long before he became one. Digital Underground’s Shock G invented a whole Rodney Dangerfield character for himself. Tone Lōc and Young MC told loopy stories about trying to get laid. The rappers deemed friendly enough for radio play were the ones who ingratiated themselves, the ones who tried to be funny. Public Enemy and N.W.A and Rakim were deadly serious, and pop radio stayed away from them like their dookie ropes were made of plutonium. When the Biz made his unlikely pop-chart breakthrough in 1989 - the first moment when a rapper really could score a pop-chart breakthrough - every rapper who crossed over was funny, or at least “funny.” It was a job requirement. It wasn’t just that the Diabolical Biz Markie was funny.
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