Goin’ Off saw Biz Markie capitalizing on his Juice Crew connections to craft a classic of comedy rap, with Marley Marl’s beats and a fiver of Big Daddy Kane ghostwrites making his solo debut a collective effort that still let its headliner’s inimitable good-natured weirdness to the forefront. When he got a bit more auteurist autonomy for the follow-up — no ringers from Kane, more beats of his own making (with co-producers Cool V and Paul C picking up where Marl left off), and nobody to tell him that maybe the awards-speech shout-outs of “Dedication” would make for a better closer than an opener. What did we get out of it? Just a legendary signature song, the surprise Top 10 hit “Just a Friend,” which still stands as one of the few friendzone laments to actually work as a pop song because it sounds exponentially more hapless than malicious (and also because he is completely unafraid to lean into one of the most shameless “I can’t sing and I know it” hooks a rapper has ever put to tape). But that’s Biz for you, pulling off ideas that few rappers without his level of instantly likable class-clown charisma could manage. It’s how he can hold forth on the benefits of staying in school and sound more like a cool older brother than a backwards-chair PSA didact (“Check It Out”), how he can craft an entire anthem about the subject of people who smell bad and get some really pungent punchlines out of it (“The Dragon”), how he can transition from stammering goofball conversationalist to a locked-in flow and back, all for the express purposes of trying to start a dance craze that makes its participants look ridiculous (“Mudd Foot”). Musically, Biz runs just as deep as his comedy chops do — his legendary beatbox technique is always a welcome presence, and his notorious record-collector depth as a DJ translates well to the production choices. (Both converge hilariously in his a cappella rendition of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” for “Me Versus Me.”)