Rammellzee On Jean-Michel Basquiat, And Fixing Flanges On Oil Tankers With Underwater Welding...

Rammellzee On Jean-Michel Basquiat, And Fixing Flanges On Oil Tankers With Underwater Welding Torches, And Sharks And Like, The Universe

“Jean-Michel only wanted drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll. He didn’t have no science. He didn’t know what to talk to no critics and if he wanted to talk he didn’t have enough to say. When I talk everybody tells me to be quiet. [laughs] Do you know why? Because I have information that comes to you either from [science], or it’s from something that comes from other people — from my peer group. Whether it came down to rap music, hip-hop music — which is slightly different, or whether it comes to break dancing. After the fight and everything like that then everybody tried to say I was his friend. Why did I get in a fight with my friend? You don’t wanna be around somebody that thinks they know it all because these fool light dwellers is giving you money. You know? Because that’s what they were. They were giving [Basquiat] a lot of money to keep a certain art-form that I considered to be graffiti, abstract painting. Where it deals with letters on the side, cross out this over there. That’s graffiti to me. Because what I do is the burner. An aerodynamic aeronautical system of the letter flying on a rolling page in a wind tunnel known as the transit system. And that’s all that happens. A letter moves backwards with its own wings, it gained the wheels off the bottom of the train. And the page became a car with a year number on it. And the gallery was rollin’. Nobody liked to hear that because it was too well put together. They want you to be abstract and sit there and say nothing.”
 — The hip-hop historians at ego trip have published, for the first time, an interview they did with graffiti artist/sculptor/rap-music pioneer Rammellzee in 1999. Rammellzee died two years ago, and did not like Jean-Michel Basqiuat, with whom he collaborated on the classic 1983 track “Beat Bop.” There’s an exhibition of Rammellzee’s work up now at the Suzanne Geiss Company gallery in Soho. And if you’re interested in graffiti or other types of visual art or rap music or New York City in the ’80s or, really, anything else, you should read this interview.