Biz Markie

Marcel Theo Hall was born on the eighth of April 1964 at the Harlem Hospital of New York, the son of a Harlem postal worker and a domestic-service worker. The family moved to the Patchogue district of Long Island when he was three. He attended the Longwood High School at Middle Island, Long Island, through the eleventh grade. He left in 1981 to pursue music professionally.

He joined in 1983 the Juice Crew under the Queensbridge producer Marley Marl — the principal East Coast hip-hop production collective of the mid-1980s — and was an early collaborator of MC Shan, Big Daddy Kane and Roxanne Shanté at the Marley Marl studios in the Queensbridge Houses. He recorded his first single Make the Music with Your Mouth, Biz at the Marley Marl studios in 1985 and his first album Goin' Off for the Cold Chillin' label in February 1988.

His decisive commercial single was Just a Friend of the album The Biz Never Sleeps of October 1989. The single — built on the 1968 Freddie Scott recording You Got What I Need — reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains one of the most-recognised hip-hop singles of the 1980s.

His 1991 album I Need a Haircut produced the legal proceeding that has across the following decades shaped the commercial sampling practices of all popular music. The track Alone Again on the album sampled — without licence — the 1972 Gilbert O'Sullivan recording Alone Again (Naturally). Grand Upright Music Ltd filed suit. Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in December 1991 that the sample required licensed payment and an injunction issued against further distribution of the album. The Grand Upright Music decision established the principle of compulsory licensure for all commercial sampling in popular music.

He continued as a producer, disc jockey and television personality through the 1990s and 2000s and appeared on Yo Gabba Gabba from 2007.

He died of complications of Type II diabetes at Baltimore on the sixteenth of July 2021, at fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the defendant of Grand Upright Music.