He called himself the Diabolical and—thanks to his beatbox skills—the Inhuman Orchestra. But both of those nicknames seem too imposing for a rapper who proudly sang off-key in Mozart wigs and rapped about spiking Big Daddy Kane’s food with boogers. Others sometimes called him the Crown Price of Hip-Hop, but that moniker doesn’t give proper respect to an icon who played a pivotal role in legendary squad the Juice Crew and helped shift hip-hop from the yes-yes-y’all party antics of its formative years to the golden era. The real Biz Markie lies somewhere in the middle: the Long Island, New York, MC, who died on 16 July 2021 at the age of 57, treated being funny and down-to-earth as a true discipline. So while his golden-age peers broke ground by spitting some of the hardest, most complex, most conscious bars of all time, Biz was brave enough to talk about picking your nose (“Pickin’ Boogers”) and how it feels kinda nice to be alone sometimes—you know, the real-life moments that usually end up on the cutting-room floor. He had fun (“Spring Again”), beatboxed in truly legendary fashion ("Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz") and sang off-key purposefully and majestically (the immortal signature hit "Just a Friend"). Nonetheless, he was in game-shifting producer Marley Marl’s Juice Crew for a reason: He could rap his ass off, and even helped introduce his high-school friend/all-time GOAT Big Daddy Kane on “Just Rhymin’ With Biz” on wax, a legendary performance later sampled by DJ Premier and dozens more. He used humour to brag with the best of them ("Biz Is Goin’ Off"), wielding self-deprecating jokes to make screwfaced peers look laughably fake in comparison.