This evening, I was eating dinner, chatting with mom about politics and mindlessly scrolling through Instagram when I came across an OkayPlayer post that read “Robert ‘Rob Base’ Ginyard‘ dead at 59 after a private battle with cancer.”
As a child of the 80s, Ginyard was part of a collection of artists responsible for popularizing and spreading hip-hop to wider audiences. And if you watched as much MTV as I did, you’d remember that during the intro for YO! MTV Raps there was a sequence taken from Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock‘s “It Takes Two.”
His death is a painful reminder of the fact that so many Black men are barely reaching 60. Brothers, we need to take care of ourselves as much as we can. In the meantime, rest easy pioneer.
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