Rammellzee channelled the city’s chaos into a spectacular personal mythology.POP MUSICGRAFFITI PROPHET
Rammellzee wanted to set New York City free.BY HUA HSUWARING ABBOTT/GETTYI
n the late nineteen-seventies, the sociol-
ogist Nathan Glazer had grown weary
of riding New York’s graiti-covered sub-
ways. The names of young vandals, who
identified themselves as “writers” rather
than as artists, were everywhere—inside,
outside, sometimes stretching across mul-
tiple train cars. Glazer didn’t know who
these writers were, or whether their trans-
gressive spirit ever manifested itself in
violent crimes, but that didn’t matter.
The daily confrontation with graiti
suggested a city under siege. “The signs
of oicial failure are everywhere,” he
wrote in an influential 1979 essay. Graiti,
with its casual anarchy and cryptic syn-
tax, ofered glimpses into a “world of
uncontrollable predators.” In the nine-ties, Glazer’s essay would help inspire
the concept of “broken windows” polic-
ing—a theory that preserving the ap-
pearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods
can foster peace and civility.
Graiti has always had this kind of
metaphorical power. It is somehow more
than art or destruction (even though it
is both), and it prompts awe or dread,
depending on your tolerance for disor-
der. For every Glazer, there were roman-
tics like Norman Mailer, who had writ-
ten the text for a book of photographs
elevating graiti to the status of “faith.”
From his perspective, graiti forced the
upper crust to reckon with the names
and the fugitive dreams of a forgotten
underclass: “You hit your name andmaybe something in the whole scheme
of the system gives a death rattle.”
Few people understood and internal-
ized this power as deeply as the artist,
rapper, and theoretician Rammellzee
(which he styled as The RAMM:-
ELL:ZEE). He believed that his time in
the train yards and the tunnels of New
York gave him a vision for how to de-
stroy and rebuild our world. He was
born in 1960 and grew up in Far Rock-
away, Queens. His birth name is a closely
guarded secret; he legally changed it to
his artistic tag in 1979. (He also insisted
that The RAMM:ELL:ZEE was an “equa-
tion,” not a name.) Little is known about
his youth, aside from passing aspira-
tions to study dentistry (he was good
with his hands) and to be a model (in
a 1980 catalogue, he is identified as
Mcrammellzee).
Ramm—as he became known—be-
lieved that language enforced discipline,
and that whoever controlled it could
steer people’s thoughts and imaginations.
His hope wasn’t to replace English; he
wanted to annihilate it from the inside
out. His generation grew up after urban
flight had devastated New York’s finances
and infrastructure. Ramm channelled
the chaos into a spectacular personal my-
thology, drawn from philology, astro-
physics, and medieval history. He was
obsessed with a story of Gothic monks
whose lettering grew so ornate that the
bishops found it unreadable and banned
the technique. The monks’ work wasn’t
so diferent from the increasingly ab-
stract styles of graiti writing, which
turned a name into something mysteri-
ous and unrecognizable. Ramm devel-
oped a philosophy, Gothic Futurism, and
an artistic approach that he called Iko-
noklast Panzerism: “Ikonoklast” because
he was a “symbol destroyer,” abolishing
age-old standards of language and mean-
ing; “Panzer” because this symbolic war-
fare involved arming all the letters of the
alphabet, so that they might liberate
themselves. He lived these ideas through
his art and his music, and by being part
of the hip-hop scene during its infancy.I
n 1983, Rammellzee and a rapper
named K-Rob went to visit the painter
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though Ramm
and Basquiat were friends, they were
also rivals. Ramm would later say that
Basquiat wasn’t a “dream artist”—he