R.I.P. hip-hop pioneer Rammellzee

As first relayed on Fab Five Freddy’s Twitter feed yesterday, iconoclastic hip-hop musician and forward-thinking graphic artist Rammellzee has died. The news was confirmed today with a message on Rammellzee’s MySpace page. He was 50 years old.
Rammellzee came up in the days when graffiti, DJing, rapping, and b-boying all commingled as separate extensions of the same sweeping cultural force, first getting noticed as a graffiti artist whose tightly controlled canvases reflected his theory of Gothic Futurism (and later “Iconic Panzerism”), where words and letters were robbed of context and shaped into fighter jets or tanks to represent their symbolic battle against the restrictions of language. According to Jeff Chang’s hip-hop scene document Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, Rammellzee got his start as an MC when he was invited, along with Fab Five Freddy, to take part in a multimedia show organized by photographer Henry Chalfant; fellow artist Doze recounts first hearing Rammellzee rap thusly: “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ This fucking guy was like, ‘Werrnnnnnnt werrnnnnnnt! Rock rock! Plop plop fizz, oh what a relief it is! Bob! Jellybeans! Spam! Ham! I figured, this guy is off his wig.”(Doze also recounts a dress rehearsal for the show that ended in a standoff between Puerto Rican and Dominican crews, which escalated once Rammellzee and his circle pulled out machetes.)
So maybe Rammellzee was a little bit crazy, but he was also an artist light-years ahead, crafting one of the most influential and sought-after hip-hop singles of all time with 1983’s epic 10-minute “Beat Bop”: Initially conceived as a battle between rivals Rammellzee and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the latter ended up being overruled by Rammellzee, who—along with K-Rob, who eventually replaced Basquiat on the record—reportedly read Basquiat’s dreadful lyrics, laughed, crumpled them up, and threw them back in his face. Nevertheless, Basquiat agreed to pay for the recording and pressing, and even designed its famous cover. “Beat Bop” subsequently became the main theme for the documentary Style Wars, and eventually, a sonic blueprint for scores of hip-hop artists to come.