Biz Markie’s legacy was celebrated by many Hip Hop peers including his longtime collaborator, DJ Cool V, who shared the story about how their hit single, “Just A Friend” came about.
“I got [Biz] in the booth and he was singing, and even though it might not be perfectly correct to anybody else, the feeling of it was good,” reflects Cool V. “He had his fist balled up and he was really trying. He was really, really crooning and I said, ‘That’s it.’ And he had one take. Then he had another take that was not as good as the first one. Right?”
He continued, ““Everybody called us crazy. Like, ‘Yo, you going to really let him do that?’ I said, ‘Man, he feeling it. I got a good feeling about this record.’ And we did it. It just took off. It morphed into something that we could never imagine.”
“Just A Friend” was a game changer not just for the duo but for R&B/Hip Hop as a whole. But V told HipHopDX that they were never compensated for actually recording the song.
“The sweetness comes in that we were able to perform it for almost 31 years,” reveals DJ Cool V. “And now comes the other side of it — we never made money off the record. I still haven’t got paid for that record…We made the money off the shows and we had a great performing career. But now it gets back to the bittersweet because every time I hear it, it’s going to remind me of Biz, but it’s also going to remind me of how I can’t make more money off of it. Everybody’s feeding their family off our work and we’ve never made money off that record.”
