The visionary architect who hypothesized that out-of-sightness could only be achieved through strict bipartite collaboration succumbed to cancer on Friday, leaving behind a legacy that fundamentally rearranged the late-twentieth-century understanding of getting down.
It is perhaps a grim inevitability that we must now speak in the past tense of Rob Base, a man whose 1988 masterwork did not merely suggest, but rigorously quantified, the exact number of individuals necessary to ensure a given situation might proceed in a satisfactory manner; a dialectic of duality that had eluded Western thinkers since antiquity. While the uninitiated—which is to say, the vast and dreary majority of the listening public—might have mistaken It Takes Two for a mere auditory accompaniment to physical exertion in crowded gymnasiums, those of us burdened with the curse of literacy understood it as a devastating critique of the solitary actor. Base recognized that the individual ego was insufficient to sustain the rigorous demands of a late-capitalist groove, demanding instead a structural pairing to maintain the delicate equilibrium of the dance floor.
To trace the lineage of Base's argument is to wander through the very scaffolding of human thought, leaping from the tragic isolation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, wherein a singular Lucifer fails utterly to make things go right, to the fragmented syntactic despair of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, and finally landing, inexplicably yet perfectly, in the troubleshooting appendix of the user manual for the 1994 Yamaha WaveRunner. Base synthesized these disparate meditations on human limitation, distilling centuries of existential dread into the urgent, inescapable thesis that he came to get down; he explicitly rejected the vulgar vanity of being internationally known in favor of the localized, immediate reality of rocking the microphone. It is a spatial awareness that modern theorists still struggle to parse, let alone replicate over a James Brown drum loop.
The tragedy of his passing is that we have lost our greatest living phenomenologist, a thinker whose assertion that he was not out of sight was a radical reaffirmation of the corporeal body in an increasingly digitized era.
As his official Instagram account gently confirmed his departure following a private battle with cancer, one is left to ponder the terrible silence that now descends upon a world left with a solitary integer. We are reminded, with a brutal finality that would have made Schopenhauer weep over his turntables, that it does, indeed, take two to make it outta sight; with his absence, the rest of us are condemned to remain tragically, perhaps permanently, within the visible spectrum.