http://elmattic.podbean.com/2010/07/01/rammellzee-elegy-for-a-gothic-futurist/Rammellzee, The RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑, The Quantum Equation, The Gothic Futurist, Iconic Panzerist, The Master Alphabiter, King of the Garbage Gods, All-Around Crazy-Ass, moved from the material(ist) plane to one of pure graffiti on June 30.
Ramm started out as a graf writer and that informed everything he did. The late ’70s, early ’80s–there was nothing we’d call hip-hop. Just graffiti. When downtown came uptown he got down with the art scene. He was in the movie Wild Style and dropped “Beat Bop” with Schockdell and Basquiat. Over the years he moved between making strange records, making strange artwork, and making very strange costumes–Iron Man by way of the garbage can.
He was one of those autodidact, true original, is-he-genius-or-just-talking-shit types. Hip-hop’s Sun Ra, George Clinton or Lee Scratch Perry, except his shit was too advanced to be as well-known and influential. Why not more famous? Well, the Museum of Modern Art owns some of his work, but in hip hop as usual the godfathers are left behind. He wasn’t really that interested in making records, and I think he was too unironic, too ghetto and too out there for the Soho scene to big him up. I mean, wine and cheese gallery openings don’t go well with homemade doll-head-covered Kabukitron outfits.
Kool Keith, K-The-I???, DJ Spooky, Killah Priest, Sir Menelik, Buck 65, Company Flow, Cannibal Ox, Super Chron Flight Brothers, Madlib, Lil B, Lil Wayne, all Anticon and Def Jux artists, and anyone who ever rapped about outer space, extreme/supreme mathematics, alien autopsies, Egyptian mythology, or any other kind of weird insane cryptic type shit, or rapped in highly coded messages of fractured language, all these people owe Rammellzee ten million dollars. Because he invented that shit in Nine. Teen. Eighty. Three.
