Rammellzee

Rammellzee figured prominently in hip-hop culture’s first move toward mainstream recognition. Although he took part in the music’s formative stages, the dominance of the gangsta stance and its proclaimed “reality” has dulled the strange edge his fiercely imaginative creations once gave the original style. Rammellzee cites Dynamite D, the conductor who boasted over the intercom about the immaculate condition of his spotless D-train, as an early influence on his approach to rap. Working alongside MCs Shock Dell and Jamal in the earliest hip-hop sound-system battles, he refined the “W.C. Fields” and “Gangsta Duck” vocal styles that Jamal had introduced. He brought the “Gangsta Duck” voice to “Beat Bop,” a densely worded exchange with K Rob that the late painter Jean Michel Basquiat nominally produced and that Profile Records issued. The track arose from spontaneous role-playing in which Rammellzee assumed the part of a pimp while K Rob adopted the persona of a schoolboy. That recording remains the fullest and strongest preserved instance of Rammellzee’s verbal acrobatics, imaginative leaps, and street surrealism.