Biz Markie was known for classic rap song “Just a Friend”
Biz Markie, the innovative yet proudly goofy rapper, DJ and producer whose self-deprecating lyrics and off-key wail on songs such as “Just a Friend” earned him the nickname Clown Prince of Hip-hop, died Friday. He was 57.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Jenni Izumi, who didn’t provide a cause.
He had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his late 40s and said that he lost 140 pounds in the years that followed. “I wanted to live,” he told ABC News in 2014.
A native New Yorker and an early collaborator with hip-hop trailblazers such as Marley Marl, Roxanne Shanté and Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie began as a teenage beatboxer and freestyle rapper. He eventually made a name for himself as the resident court jester of the Queensbridge-based collective the Juice Crew and its Cold Chillin’ label, under the tutelage of influential radio DJ Mr. Magic.
On “Goin’ Off” (1988), his debut album, Biz Markie introduced himself as a bumbling upstart with a juvenile sense of humor — the opening track, “Pickin’ Boogers,” was about exactly that — but his charm and his skills were undeniable, making him a plausible sell to an increasingly rap-curious crossover audience.
With direct, often mundane lyrics written in part by his childhood friend Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie was a hip-hop Everyman whose chief love was music, a journey he broke down over a James Brown sample on his first hip-hop hit, the biographical “Vapors”; Snoop Doggy Dogg later adapted the song for his own 1997 version.
But Biz Markie soon outpaced his peers commercially, becoming a pop sensation with the unlikely 1989 smash “Just a Friend,” from “The Biz Never Sleeps,” which was released by Cold Chillin’ and Warner Bros. Over a plunked piano beat, borrowing its melody from the 1968 song “(You) Got What I Need,” recorded by Freddie Scott and written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Biz Markie raps an extended tale about being unlucky in love.
“Just a Friend” would go platinum, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart and No. 9 on the allgenre Hot 100. He said he realized how big it had gotten “when Howard Stern and Frankie Crocker and all the white stations around the country started playing it.” And although Biz Markie would never again reach the heights of “Just a Friend” — he failed to land another single on the Hot 100 — he brushed off those who referred to him dismissively as a one-hit wonder.
“I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I know what I did in hiphop.”
After the release of the album “I Need a Haircut” in 1991, Biz Markie and his label were sued by representatives for Irish singersongwriter Gilbert O’sullivan, who said eight bars of his 1972 hit “Alone Again (Naturally)” were sampled without permission on Biz Markie’s “Alone Again.” A lawyer for O’sullivan called sampling “a euphemism in the music industry for what anyone else would call pickpocketing”; a judge agreed, calling for $250,000 damages and barring further distribution of the album.
That ruling would help set a precedent in the music industry by requiring that even small chunks of sampled music — a cornerstone of hip-hop aesthetics and studio production — must be approved in advance.
Biz Markie made appearances on the big and small screens, usually as a version of himself. He was seen in the movie “Men in Black II,” heard as a voice on “Spongebob Squarepants,” and appeared on “Blackish” and as the beatboxing pro behind “Biz’s Beat of the Day” on the children’s show “Yo Gabba Gabba!” He also became a dedicated collector of rare records and toys, including Beanie Babies, Barbies and television action figures.