Songfacts®:

• "It Takes Two" has filled many dance floors over the years. Many of us know the lyrics by heart, but there's one line we usually get wrong. When Rob Base raps what sounds like "can't stand sex," he's actually referring to "sess," a kind of marijuana called sinsemilla. The full line is: "Don't smoke buddha, can't stand sess."
  
  "Buddha" is also a strain of marijuana, so Base is letting us know that he doesn't indulge.
• The song is built on a sample of a 1972 track called "Think (About It)" that was recorded by the soul singer Lyn Collins but written and produced by James Brown, the man responsible for a plurality of samples in hip-hop, especially in the '80s.
  
  Many other artists sampled "It Takes Two" but Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock figured out how to loop just the right elements of the song into an inescapable groove. Most importantly, they kept the "woo... yeah" vocal going throughout the track, which sounds like it would get really annoying but somehow doesn't. They also made these lines from Collins' vocal into the hook:
  
  It takes two to make a thing go right
  It takes two to make it outta sight
  
  These lines don't show up until 1:28 into "Think (About It)" and show up just once. They're surrounded by that memorable little bass riff, which "It Takes Two" incorporates as well.
  
  "Think (About It)" was just a modest hit, charting at #66 in America, so most listeners were hearing it for the first time on "It Takes Two."
• The outa-space introduction of the song is spoken over a sample of Galactic Force Band's 1978 tune "Spacedust."
• Rob Base (Robert Ginyard) and DJ E-Z Rock (Rodney "Skip" Bryce) are from Harlem, New York, and made by far their biggest impact with this early hip-hop anthem. The song is filled with lots of clever rhymes from Rob Base, but tied together with the hook, which relates to the duo: It takes the two of them to make a thing go right.
  
  The It Takes Two album had two more popular songs: "Get on the Dance Floor" and "Joy And Pain." After releasing an album in 1994, Bryce was diagnosed with diabetes and the duo split up. In 2014, Bryce died at 46 after suffering a seizure.
• Rob Base found the Lyn Collins record when he and E-Z Rock were at a friend's house going through albums. He had the lyric written already, so that night when they went in the studio, they brought along the Lyn Collins album and combined the song "Think (About It)" with a beat E-Z Rock came up with to form the track.
  
  "It was quick," he told ESPN. "In that era of hip-hop, we were all digging through crates of old records trying to find beats and samples no one had used before, so that was the key - if you found something that was hot, that no one had used, you pretty much had something, for sure. It worked out really well for us waiting to the last second. We had no idea what we were going to do in the studio that night, but the music just came together."
• "It Takes Two" has itself been frequently sampled. The songs that have borrowed from it include Fatman Scoop's 2004 UK Top 10 hit "It Takes Scoop," Snoop Dogg's 2009 single "I Wanna Rock," and the Black Eyed Peas' 2010 disc "Rock That Body."
• In 1989 Spin magazine ranked "It Takes Two" the greatest single of all time. The choice was criticized by some, including critic David Hinckley, who according to Dave Marsh's book The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, described it as "the equivalent of a three-year-old shooting his mother with a squirt gun in order to get her attention." The song was also ranked (less controversially) at #37 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop and #18 on VH1's 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the '80s.
• Carly Rae Jepsen and Lil Yachty did a new version of this song for a Target commercial that aired as a full-length video during the 2017 Grammy Awards. The video opens with a kid buying the original album.
• This plays during a bonkers promo celebrating 100 years of the NFL that debuted during the 2019 Super Bowl. In the spot, star players past and present are enjoying a banquet when a football falls to the floor, triggering a scrum and a series of plays.
• The video was made on the fly, shot on 125th street in Harlem outside the Apollo Theater. They didn't have anything planned, so they just had Rob Base rap his part in front of a crowd. EZ-Rock did some dancing, and Biz Markie and Red Alert both stopped by and made appearances. It was directed by Peter Lauer, who went on to direct episodes of many popular TV shows, including Scrubs, Young Sheldon, and Chuck.
• The song found new life when it was included on the first ESPN Jock Jams compilation in 1995. Rob Base ended up performing the song at various sporting events, often as halftime entertainment during basketball games.