1989's The Biz Never Sleeps went gold, and the single "Just a Friend" went platinum. The album's title derived in part from Markie's desire to assure listeners that he would be as effective as his own producer as he had been as a performer. "I wasn't sleeping," he insisted to Word Up!, "but people were sleeping on me. They thought I was gonna come out wack because I did this record myself. I didn't." For Darren Ressler of DJ Times, "Just a Friend" and the companion single "Spring Again" constituted "easily two of 1990's best summertime jams." As the Biz himself told Ressler, "Those are the best songs. I don't know about anyone else, but my best stuff is when I talk about myself."
And the "self" he revealed was a far cry from the threatening boasts and political augury of his peers. Bring the Noise authors Nelson and Gonzales placed him "in the context of Black comedians from Redd Foxx to Richard Pryor (during Pryor's early years)," explaining, "What these funny-men did was take everyday occurrences and make jokes about them." "The scatology of Foxx, Pryor and such acolytes as Eddie Murphy," the authors continued, "echoes in the bodily-function comedy of Biz's most outrageous recordings." Read more about Biz here.
