Goofy rapper known for classic 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 like “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.
Biz Markie had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his late 40s and said 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 like 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.
“When I was a teenager, I wanted to be down/With a lot of MC-DJ-ing crews in town,” Biz Markie rapped. “So in school on Noble Street, I say, ‘Can I be down, champ’/They said no, and treated me like a wet food stamp.”
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.
But it was his pained, rough-edged singing on the song’s chorus — along with the “yo’ mama” jokes and the Mozart costume he wore in the music video — that made the song indelible: “Oh, baaaaby, you / You got what I neeeeeed / But you say he’s just a friend / But you say he’s just a friend.”
Marcel Theo Hall was born April 8, 1964, in New York City. He was raised on Long Island, where he was known around the neighborhood as Markie, and he took his original stage name, Bizzy B Markie, from the first hip-hop tape he ever heard in the late 1970s, by the L Brothers, featuring Busy Bee Starski.