An Encoded Visionary: Companion Notes for An Hour for RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ

RAM plus M for Magnitude, Sigma (Σ) the first summation operator, first L - longitude, second L - latitude, Z - z-bar, Σ, Σ - summation.

It’s advisable to feel particularly well rested and clear headed before you read on and flush yourself down Rammellzee’s wildly inexplicable cosmic wormhole. To contemplate the life, work and cultural impact of one of hip-hops true originals and most idiosyncratic thinkers is a feat that is taxing to the grey matter. Indeed to quote Peter Shapiro’s 1997 profile of the enigmatic artist nobody took the figurative implications of hip hop as far out or as literally as Rammellzee; his life’s work was dedicated to the creation, embodiment and continual refinement of a densely articulated mythology which used the rudiments of hip hop and street art as the foundation for an elaborate and ornate battle plan that very few on planet earth could decipher or pin down. His theories were expressed through the mediums of paint, sculpture, music and print and they waged a covert war on the cultural racism he saw as pregnant within western culture. Such singular focus made him a very distant outlier in hip-hop culture whose centre has always been dominated by hackneyed rags to riches stories enriched with benjamins, broads and bentleys.

Ramm’s life and as well as his ideological positions existed far beyond the realms of the standard issue street-hustling MC. In a remarkable life that ran for nearly 50 years before his untimely death in 2010, Rammellzee, who legally changed his name in 1979, has been a male model on the books of Wilhomenia Cooper’s legendary modelling agency, briefly dated Madonna, played an infamous bit part in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, held artist residencies in Italy and Holland, had a fist fight with Jean Michel Basquiat and has worked in music with the likes Bootsy Collins, Bill Laswell, James Lavelle’s UKNLE and the Death Comet Crew. 

A constant state of advancement saw him progress from being a pugnacious philosophically minded subway bomber tagging the a-line as Evolution Griller to becoming a fully fledged artist painting on canvas, creating mixed media sculptures and gallery installations. The conceptual intrigue and arresting visual power of Ramm’s work has entailed that in death he remains a constantly exhibited artist whose work commands $50,000 price tags at Sothebys and whose street art signatures now adorn a limited edition set of Nike Dunks. 

Despite a flirtatious relationship with the mainstream Ramm would always remain a figure incapable of being absorbed into the popular centre. At the base of his creative practice was a set of vigorously theorised and almost unfathomable conceptual frameworks called ikonolklast panzerism and gothic futurism.  

It would take a team of oxford dons many years to fully stabilise the complicated essence of these theories so for the purposes of brevity they will be simplified in these companion notes otherwise we’d be engulfed with an eighteen volume exegesis. Instead these notes seek to focus on his on/off career as an MC for hire and an infrequent musical artist. Ramm is quoted as saying that he didn’t like music and that ‘I just do it because it’s another sculpture to me, i break things off, the sound vibrates the sculpture’ but despite this position he has engraved an indelible sonic legacy in to the musical rock face that bares closer inspection. 

From the rubble of the bronx…

For me and others hip-hop culture’s first genuine overground moment struck a bum note in terms of being a faithful depiction of the culture from whence it came; the syrupy good time disco bump and goofy rap of the Sugarhill Gang’s early rap anthem ‘Rapper’s Delight’ for many defiled the gritty and complex substance of hip-hop. This was after all supposed to be music which came from the rubble of the Bronx and not from John Travolta’s flairs.

Far more faithful documents were issued in the following years. By 1983 Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s peerless documentary Style Wars had managed to capture the lightning of hip-hops formative years in bottle. Charlie Ahearn produced a dramatised document of hip-hop’s nascent years in his masterpiece ‘Wildstyle’ made in the same year. Although featuring some very ham acting and a slightly jerky plot the visual appeal of the film is what makes it memorable. Perhaps the most memorable scene comes at the climax of the film where rappers, breakers, DJs and grafitti writers all descend on a repurposed amphitheatre in East River Park in New York's Lower East Side to perform to a packed crowd. One of the rappers stands out from the others, dressed in a dark trench coat brandishing a toy machine gun Rammellzee almost bursts through the screen via the relentlessness of his flow.

Hip-Hop emerged from the strife ridden Bronx and it’s earliest practitioners were living in perilous conditions where all of the dangers of urban living created a pressurised environment from which the five elements of hip-hop were created as a means to rise above and express this lived reality. Despite living somewhat removed from the Bronx epicentre Rammellzee, from Far Rockaway (Queens), was one of those early practitioners who fully embraced the utility of the elements of hip-hop as a means to elevate and rise above the mundanity and dogma of society’s structures.

By 1979 Rammellzee had legally changed his name to Rammellzee and found himself at something of a crossroads. The son of an African-American Mother and an Italian American Father who worked as a transit detective, Ramm was a promising student with academic potential sufficient for him to be able to consider a career in dentistry. However such was the magnetism of the cult of the b-boy that Ramm ditched that career path and started to make his own unique iteration of the culture he cherished so much.

By the time he appeared in Wild Style Ramm had been steadily bombing trains all the way from his neighbourhood into lower Manhattan. When listening to Ramm eulogise about graffiti in interviews it’s clear that he gained an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the broad gamut of writing styles and writers that proliferated in New York. Yet whilst aware and respectful of other writers Ramm came to see himself as somewhat different from the rest of the writers; they were writing graffiti whilst he was dealing in Iconoclast Panzerism founded on Gothic Futurism. We’ll try and unpick those weighty conceptual packages briefly now…

“He felt that even now if you control the language, you control the discourse, you control the power,” Henry Chalfant on Rammellzee

“Iconoclast’ means symbol destroyer, ‘ism’ is practice, and ‘Panzer’ is armoured division. You know, Rommel? Rommel, the desert Fox? The tank division for Hitler was commanded by a person named Rommel—see, so we have something in common there. He designed the tanks for Hitler’s World War and I design the tanks for the trains. So, Rommel/Rammell, right? And after everything was developed, somewhere around 1979, all this stuff started with Cap and the styles were simply taken out. The transit system was taking it out, washing off the good stuff first. Leaving what we call the cancer to the blood system—the transit system is a blood system, it’s just like the veins in your arm. BMTs over here, INDs over here, IRTs over here, and they all flow with human beings. We call it information, it’s like the super highway but it’s underground.”

MC Rammellzee Interviewed By Ed Gill on 28.06.1995 at Dos Shot Studios, London. Released as a limited edition 12” by Vinyl Factory and Mo Wax in 2014.

Iconoclast Panzerism was Rammellzee’s decision to formulate artistic practice that took an understanding of language as power and took this idea to its furthest and most outlandish conclusions. After studying the calligraphy of fourteenth century monks Ramm made a connection from their ornate dressing of letters to the spray can flourishes applied to letters by his contemporaries in the graffiti world. However for Ramm the work that his contemporaries undertook did not go for enough. For Rammellzee language as a stable and reliable framework for interaction, commerce and knowledge production was all ill-founded; language was a violence. Thus he worked on a style of graffiti that he dubbed Iconoclast Panzerism and it focused on creating aerodynamic and weaponised letters that were ready for battle. Letters would become densely fortified units with harpoons and missile launchers appended to them. What’s compelling about this theory is that Rammellzee showed how seriously he took the militant tendencies of his doctrine by creating 26 letter racers that were physical objects he painstakingly designed and could readily fly in to battle when required.

In 1983 after a long and distinguished career as an art historian, author and broadcaster Lord Kenneth Clark passed away following a fall at a nursing home in Kent. Pehaps his most significant legacy was the hugely popular BBC series Civilization that pondered the history and importance of western art, architecture and philosphy since the dark ages. As a mark of how widespread the series became by the time of his death in 1983 Clark’s rendering of history had crossed the atlantic and penetrated the absorbent mind of a young Rammellzee who took what Clark had to say on gothic art and ran with it in to his own intellectual playground.

Gothic Futurism was born out of Ramm’s infatuation with gothic culture that Clarks programmes had piqued. To his mind the art and architecture of the gothic period displayed a much needed resistance to the cultural imperialism of the Romans. As with Iconoclast Panzerism Ramm forged a hitherto unfounded connection between the works of 14th century monks whose elaborate calligraphy in the early bibles was eventually outlawed by the papal hierarchy and 20th century graffiti artists fighting their own battles with the NYC transit police. A Gothic Futurist was someone embracing of the fight to resist the totalising forces of homogeneity and uniformity, someone holding onto the spirit of untamed barbarism.

“The “Gothic” refers, as Rammellzee states, to the dark continent of the subways. The element of aeronautic movement and mechanism is where the “Futurism” plays into his cosmology. Gothic Futurism is the ever-evolving ideology that he first introduced in 1979, by way of a series of discursive, complex manifestos that outline his belief that language, over thousands of years, has been co-opted by the powers that be to manipulate and control our “diseased society.” By employing his tactical mechanics of Ikonoklast Panzerism, an evolution of wild-style graffiti, individual letters can be liberated, armed like tanks, and deployed like a virus through the circulatory system of the subways, attacking the institutions of control and enacting a total reformation of the written and spoken word.”

Max Wolf curator of the Racing for Thunder exhibition - 2018 (Quoted in Mousse Magazine)

BEAT BOP & BEYOND….

Yet despite falling deep into his own intricate world of linguistic terrorism Ramm had another overground moment in 1983 thanks for his collaboration with his frenemy Jean Michel Basquiat. Now regarded as one of the most coveted and collectable hip hop 12”s “Beat Bop” was created on money Basquiat had gathered as part of his new found fame in the early 80s. As a darling of the downtown art scene Basquiat had enough cash to splash on studio sessions for his friends and having spent time with Ramm he clearly knew that he had a decent rapper to invite to the session. Alongside a young K-Rob and a host of musicians laying down a spongy, supple and live hip-hop groove Ramm spits his way through the 10 minutes of Beat Bop barely taking a breath. At times washed out with reverb and at others sharp and nasally (a vocal style he christened the Gangsta Duck) Ramm changes character five times within the piece and leaves K-Rob with scarcely a minute of airtime at the start of the track before taking centre stage, as a curtain up moment for an MC career you couldn’t do much better.

Ramellzee’s stock had certainly risen by the time Beat Bop had been received and lauded, it was a moment when a young man stood with the path to fame clearly visible to him. With his high cheekbones and charismatic mic persona Hollywood could have quite feasibly been Ramm’s next destination as he went the Will Smith from rapper to leading man. As an almost prophetic gesture Ramm was immortalised in Basquiat’s “Hollywood Africans” painting that set depictions of Ramm, Toxic and Basquiat amidst a swirl of thinly veiled criticism levelled at the film industry for the marginal roles given to African-Americam actors. The paiting was made following an extended visit to LA Rammellzee made with Basquiat and Toxic in 1983. In the following year Hollywood with a small h did come calling for Ramm when No Wave film director Jim Jarmusch cast Rammellzee in his cult classic Stranger Than Paradise. But whilst Hollywood was beckoning Ramm instead distracted by his own vision of the future - one that escehewed the path to stardom and instead slavlishly focused on the production of art in service to his rapildly expanding theories of ikonoklast panzerism and gothic futurism.

Buoyed by sales of his artwork in the aftermath of Beat Bop Ramm ditched his previously decided career path, to train as a dentist, and took up residence in a Tribecca loft apartment that he would call “The Battle Station”. Ensconsed in his kingdom Ramm would dedicate years of life to the creation of intricate junk schulptures, elaborate battle suits and mixed media works on canvas that all iterated his vision of an emnacipated language made possible by his own cast of heroes and villains.

Despite his almost all consuming passion for creating art Ramm still found time to create music albeit sporadic projects made seemingly as and when he pleased. We’re going to profile some of the records he made in chonologoical order.

BEAT BOP 

Thanks to its iconic blackboard style sleeve designed by Basquiat the Beat Bop 12” has become one of the most collectable hip hop 12”s, equally for its cache as a symbol of pop art as much as its musical content. For many though the stripped back and spaced out musical backing and the dense verbal weave of Rammellzee mark the single out as massively ahead of its time, and is name checked by Cypress Hill and the Beastie Boys as an influence on their work

Slinky Gym School

The backstory to this piece of one off mutant electro is compelling as one would expect from anything involving Rammellzee. Recorded, mixed and edited during the months of September - November 1983, at Robert Crash's Flying Studio in Cologne. Ramm inexplicably, alongside all of his other commitments in 1983, managed to pop up in Germany and add vocals to this crazed, but slightly of its time, electro wonkiness. Slinky Gym School was a one off studio project that featured Robert Crash and Quick Culture & Die Partei members Tom Dokoupil, Walter Dahn and Detlev Kühne.

Rammellzee and Shockdell

Around the tale end of the 80s the auteur producer Bill Laswell formed a group around Ramm called Ghettovetts. Laswell as-well as his faithful spar Nicky Skopelitis handled the musical content whilst Ramm and his graff buddy Delta aka Shockdell assumed the roles of the rhyming Ghettovetts. Their album was signed by Island subsidiary 4th and Broadway and of the 4 singles that came from the album this is one of my favourites primarily because Ramm lays down a “lecture” on the b-side that sees him unpack his mental suitcase for over 7 minutes over a grinding industrial funk groove with Bootsy Collins on bass.

This Is What You Made Me

The 90s appeared to be a baron period for Ramm in terms of musical output and aside from a fairly spartan contribution to an UNKLE track in 1998 very little was issued from the MIC of Ramm during the 90s. Other things may have kept him occupied in the 90s but when the new millennium rolled around Ramm seemed inspired to take on several new projects. The first to appear was this Japan-only release credited to “The Rammellzee”. Ramm had found a warm welcome to his art in Japan, in particular his ornate battle suits found favour amongst Japanese audiences. Unsurprising given that they are strongly reminiscent of the battle armour that Japanese Samurai warriors would have worn. The album is produced primarily by D.O.I and DJ Kensei and their abstract future leaning beatscapes play the perfect foil to the high intensity verbal stungun that Ramm prods into the listeners ear canal for 9 track album.

Bi-Conicals of the Rammellzee

A year after the Japan only release came this follow up LP jammed with guest producers. The Bi-Conicals….. was a much more mixed bag than This Is What You Made Me. Where the latter was abstracted and blunted throughout this album saw Ramm play with styles. Stuart Argabright of the Death Comet Crew guest produces 3 of the tracks.

Cosmic Flush

For those wanting a definitive statement of where Rammellzee’s voice is best encapsulated then this posthumously issued set of tracks is a fine legacy document. Jonah "Th' Mole" Mociun collaborated long distance with Ramm in the years before his death in 2010. Ramm’s death put a near decade long hold on the project seeing the light of day but it was finally released in 2019. Far from riding old school hip-hop beats this instead sees Ramm’s insular and paranoid rap schemas matched to similarly fractious and skittish sonic beds reducing speed metal, experimental electronics and abstracted beatscapes in to a nerve jangling web of distracted noise. To my mind this is perhaps the best bedfellow that Ramm’s lyrics have ever found. Similar to Richard Linklater’s reimagining of Philip K Dick’s novel of the same name Mociun’s choice of musical accompaniment perfectly compliments the unreal thrust of Ramm’s wordplay.

Inspirations, acolytes and biters…..

When inspecting the lives and legacies of singular characters it’s often easy to cite who they have influenced but hard to say who influenced them. Figures like Rammellzee seem to come into existence without precedent and by their very nature resist being subsumed into a well behaved and orderly narrative subset of like-minds.

Rammellzee may have been without equal in the hip-hop world but it’s relatively straightforward to discern where his considerable musical influence has touched. In terms of looking for influences there is very little in the way of primary material to deal with. As far as my research has taken me Ramm has only briefly discussed his musical influences and they extend only as far as a handful of first wave hip-hop groups like Fearless Four and Afrika Bambaata. Therefore when looking for influences it’s been most fertile looking at the suggestions of others….

Sun Ra

By his own acknowledgement took a modicum of inspiration from the Afro Futurist forefather Sun Ra. Indeed in one of the many subdivided explanations of his name that I have read or listened to Rammellzee explains that the Ramm component of his name is in honour to the famed warrior pharoah Ramesses II. Eyptology connections aside Ramm’s affinity for extravanagant stage outfits as well as his complex personal mythology creates strong grounds for establishing a connection between the two figures and many writers have readily absorbed Ramm into the lineage of Afro Futurist musicians starting with Ra and currently inhabiting the works of Shabazz Palaces and Actress.

But Ramm was always keen to distance himself from Afro Futurism, emphasising that he self identified as a Gothic Futurist and was reticient to be designated as an afrofuturist. Such rampant individualism calls to mind another iconoclast musician…

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry

Perry’s brilliance in the studio was matched by the eccentricity of his worldview. It’s often hard to put into words the exact substance of this worldview as it seemed to exist unto itself, a living organism that mutated in line with Perry’s mood and substance intake. Where Ramm had his battlestation Perry had his black Ark both serving as extensions of the minds of the creators that inhabited them.

In Perry Rammellzee has probably his most likeminded creative counterpart. Perry created in accordance with his own self-created mythology, one closely aligned with a natural order based on the balance of earth, fire and water. In explaining his music Perry would submerge the listener in a dense and impenetrable stream of nonsensical ramblings.

Ultimately what unites the two creatives is the creation of art under the influence of heavy amounts of alcohol and marijuana.

Cypress Hill

The Californian hip-hop group are perhaps one of the most herbally synonymous musical groups in existence. Yet beyond their staunch love of the chronic the group have a lot to thank Rammellzee for. In their early years as a group frontman B-Real was struggling to find a voice that would help him cut through. After listening to Rammellzee B-Real produced an almost exact facsimilie of the nasal ‘Gangsta Duck' style that Ramm pioneered on Beat Bop and has since built an entire career out of it.

Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys were always impeccable when it came to paying dues to their sources of inspiration. Hotsaucecommitteeparttwo, their 2011 album, features a dedication to Rammellzee who had passed a year earlier. Their slightly adenoidal vocal delivery certainly owes a debt to Ramm although they should be applauded for biting in a less gauche way than B-Real.

New Flesh

Juice Aleem from the UK reggae hip-hop outfit New Flesh was one of the few new school MCs that Rammellzee gave credit to. The feelings were strongly reciprocated from Aleem and his group who gave two guest spots to Rammellzee on their 2002 album Understanding. In a quote taken from Roy Christopher’s excellent book “Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future” Aleem heaps praise on Ramm…

“Rammellzee is the equation, Father to a lot of styles in a lot of traditions and I’m just thankful to have known him and have worked with him. In even the few times that we met so much wisdom was imparted it was incredible. His lineage is also the real and true artist, the gangster artist who learns and touches by an innate skillset. He is the furthest thing from the fame/art school celeb and continued on regardless to his position in the history books. This is a lesson he taught all of us”

Actress

Darren Cunningham aka Actress has been at work in the experimental fringes of techno, electro and instrumental hip-hop for 15 years. A jewel in the crown of UK electronic music he has never aligned himself with a scene and has instead steadily created music that makes sense to himself and his own diet of influences at the time of creation.

It’s unsurprising that on his 2017 album AZD Cunningham chose to doff his cap to Rammellzee. Sampling his voice on the track CYN, NYC backwards, the press release for the album very adroitly explains the methodology….

“Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterpreting them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.”

D.Ham

David “D.Ham” Hamilton is a Noods Resident, Dark Lord of the Vaults, and a general man about town in the Bristol music scene. He’s also an absolutely brilliant MC channeling the spirit of Rammellzee with his absurdist wordplay and darkly comic delivery. His skill has been put to good use recently with guest spots on Hamish ‘Kinlaw’ Trevis’s recent LP as well as proividing nearly a whole album of freakish verbalisations on the newly released Parable of the Empty Cup album on Bokeh Versions.

Conclusion

I read the story of Bryan Johnson recently. He’s silicon valley tech bro turned rejuvanetion athelete and BioHacker who is seeking to reverse the ageing process by funnelling $2M a year into a crazed regime of supplements, laser therapy, restricted diet and 8.30 bedtimes. His goal is to reverse and or at the very least arrest the process of ageing so that he can live to a ripe old age well over 100 and thus provide a “blueprint” for the rest of us to follow. In reading his story I was struck by how diamterically opposed his life is to that of Rammellzee.

Johnson’s life and daily regime leads like the plot from one of those strangely agnostic sci-fi blockbusters, one where the future is cast as a curiously serene existence where science is our quiet and benevolent guide through mostly untroubled but numb existences.

Ramm’s life was quite the opposite. Sci-fi was his reality but only according to the terms of the science fiction that he was busily writing, enshrining and encoding as an alternative to the western imperialist world he found himself in. Ramm left no clearly understood blueprint for this world - only an impenetrable treatise, countless sculptures and paintings as well as his vocal performances-almost all of which were extended monologues on gothic futurism or ancillary subject matter.

Ramm’s body was merely a vessel upon which were layered the multiple identities that he came to create to inhabit this intricate alternate universe. By the time of his death a coterie of 22 characters had been created either deified as resin statues or marked with costumes all designed and inhabited by Rammellzee. The figures ranged from an intergalactic monk to a crooked bookmaker, all of them fitted into the intricate alterniverse of Rammellzee.

Death was never going to be the end for Rammellzee. His physical existence ended in 2010 when his body gave up following 49 years of ingesting paint fumes, drinking too much heavy liquor and smoking too many cigarettes. But an end to his physical life was not going to be a full stop. His widow remarked on his passing that “his energy has just gone out the Van Allen Belt and pretty soon it’s going to come back to us again.”
Further Reading/Listening/Watching

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Rammellzee: It's Not Who But What- Documentary | Red Bull Music (A perfectly formed 10 minute mini-documentary produced by Red Bull that coincided with them running various exhibitions of Ramm’s work including the Racing for Thunder exhibit in 2018.)

Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism - Explained in brief

Underground Inner Thinking: A Rammellzee Reader - An absolutely essential document for those seeking to understand more of Rammellzee. Includes review excerpts from Edit DeAk, Stuart Morgan as well as a trasnscript from the mid 90s interview with Ed Gill that has now been released as a 12” by Mo Wax.

Period Piece: Rammellzee and the End - To my mind Sean McTiernan and Dave Tompkins are the two figures who have done the most work to really get to the essence of Rammellzee. Here’s a wonderful article from Tompkins that expounds on the mystery of someone that Tompkins considered a friend.

125: Stranger Than Paradise (Rammellzee) Ft. Sean McTiernan - A great podcast that features Sean McTiernan poetically explaining the importance and legacy of Rammellzee.

The Work of Rammellzee: Jeff “Chairman” Mao - Hip-hop journalist Jeff Mao answers questions on Rammellzee’s life and work.

Richard Sen interview: subculture, criminology and the link between Acid House and Graffiti - For those wanting to know more about Richard Sen.