Flashback Friday: Dave Griffith on Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock

As you may have heard, Rob Base died recently at 59. If you’ve been following the tournaments, you’ll remember him from “It Takes Two,” which won the 2023 tournament.

So for this Flashback Friday, we thought we’d reprint Dave Griffith’s March Sadness 80s Edition tournament-winning essay “The Situation That the Bass Is In.” You can read the whole thing on the site (and revisit Janet Dale’s excellent essay it defeated too). Or start reading here and click on through to the site (or if you’re a paying subscriber, read the whole thing here). Let’s go!

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?

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Read the whole thing on the site (or if you’re a paying subscriber, read on, gangster; we appreciate you!).