didn’t so much radiate visions outward
as take things in like a “sponge,” learn-
ing about genius from books. He and
Ramm once bet on who could most con-
vincingly parody the other’s work.
(Ramm claimed not only that he won
but that Basquiat’s art dealer, who wasn’t
in on their ruse, told Basquiat that “his”
work was the best he had ever done.)
That night, Basquiat invited Ramm
and K-Rob to record a song he’d writ-
ten. Ramm, who had rapped in the
movie “Wild Style,” was already known
for his unique nasal sneer. (He called it
his “gangster duck” style.) The two men
looked at Basquiat’s elementary rhymes,
laughed, and tossed them in the trash.
Instead, they made up their own lyr-
ics—a brilliant, surreal tale of a kid (the
earnest, bemused K-Rob) who’s on his
way home and a hectoring pimp (Ramm)
who tries to tempt him toward the dark
side. Basquiat called the song “Beat
Bop,” and paid for it to be produced;
he painted the vinyl single’s cover art
himself. The song was murky and
strange, like a spiky funk jam slowed to
a sinister crawl. In the background,
someone tunes a violin. There’s so much
echo and reverb on the track that it
sounds like an attempt at time travel.
In the eighties, graiti gained accep-
tance in the art world. Despite Ramm’s
charisma, the intensity of his work and
his stubborn, erratic personality kept him
on the movement’s fringes. Where Bas-
quiat and Keith Haring seemed shy show-
men, Ramm came across as a nutty pro-
fessor. His early paintings took inspiration
from the psychedelia of comic books and
science fantasy, with mazy train tracks
running across cosmic reliefs. His palette
was attuned to the era’s anxieties about
nuclear war and nuclear waste. The col-
ors were bright and garish, suggesting a
box of neon highlighters run amok.
In the mid-eighties, he began render-
ing these ideas in 3-D. He made sculp-
tures that evoked the fossilized remains
of twentieth-century life: newspaper clip-
pings, key rings, chain links, and other
junk, floating in an epoxy ooze. The most
remarkable works were his “Garbage
Gods,” full-body suits of armor, some of
which weighed more than a hundred
pounds. They look like junk-yard Trans-
formers doing samurai cosplay. His most
famous character, the Gasholeer, was out-
fitted with a small flamethrower.
Ramm’s art, thought, and music are
the subject of the exhibition “RAM-
M∑LLZ∑∑: Racing for Thunder,” at Red
Bull Arts New York. Befitting the pop-
ular drink’s own sense of iconoclasm,
“Racing” bathes in Ramm’s frenzied,
free-associative, and occasionally over-
whelming energy. There are his early
canvases and sculptures, along with flyers,
business cards, manifestos, and patent
applications. A small theatre screens pre-
viously unseen videos of Ramm rapping
at night clubs. The most impressive part
of the survey is a floor devoted to his
“Garbage Gods” and “Letter Racers”—
skateboards representing each letter of
the alphabet, armed with makeshift rock-
ets, screwdrivers, and blades.
Throughout the exhibition, you can
hear moments from Ramm’s lectures
on Gothic Futurism—a thrilling jum-
ble of street-corner hustling and tech-
nical language, all “parsecs,” “integers,”
“aerodynamics.” As I was examining a
collection of hand-painted watches, I
kept hearing Ramm pause as he reached
the end of a long disquisition on eco-
logical catastrophe and graiti-as-war-
fare, and then bark, “Next slide!”I
n early May, the Red Bull Music Fes-
tival staged a Ramm-inspired concert
to mark the opening of the art show.
Ramm had continued to make music
after “Beat Bop,” never wavering from
his philosophies, just declaring them
against increasingly turbulent, industrial-
sounding backdrops. The eclecticism of
the bill spoke to his wandering ear, and
ranged from the terse hardcore of Show
Me the Body to the wise-ass raps of Wiki.
K-Rob, wearing a T-shirt featuring a
mushroom and the words “I’m a Fun
Guy,” reprised his verse from “Beat Bop,”
grinning the whole way through. Gio
Escobar, the leader of the deft punk-jazz
band Standing on the Corner, dedicated
a song to a late friend. The departed are
everywhere around us, he said, as a groove
emerged from the band’s dubbed-out
chaos. “And they’re waiting.”
As hip-hop and art changed, as graiti
vanished from New York’s trains and
walls, Ramm delved further into his own
private cosmos—namely, the enormous
loft in Tribeca where he lived, which he
called the Battle Station. His obscurity
wasn’t a choice. In the early eighties, he
ofered to send the U.S. military someof the intelligence he had gathered for
national defense. (It declined.) In 1985,
he wrote an opera, “The Requiem of
Gothic Futurism.” In the nineties, he
tried to promote his ideas by producing
a comic book and a board game. He
thought that toy manufacturers might
want to mass-produce his “Garbage
Gods” models. He was the first artist to
collaborate with the streetwear brand
Supreme. There was a series of infomer-
cial-like videos to seed interest in “Al-
pha’s Bet,” an epic movie that he hoped
would finally resolve the narrative arc
of his extended universe.
By the time Rammellzee died, in
2010, after a long illness, New York City
had been completely remade by may-
oral administrations that took bro-
ken-windows policing as gospel. The
Battle Station became condos. The In-
ternet has made it easy to take what the
culture provides you and rearrange it in
some novel, cheeky way. It’s much more
diicult to build an entirely new world—
to abide by an ethical vision with a fe-
rocity that requires you to break all the
rules. I was surprised by how moved I
felt standing underneath Ramm’s “Let-
ter Racers” and studying the textures of
the “Garbage Gods.” To see their me-
ticulous handiwork up close was to be-
lieve that Ramm’s far-flung theories, his
mashup of quantum physics and “slan-
guage,” made sense as an outsider’s sur-
vival strategy. I noticed all the discarded
fragments of city life—bulbs and screws,
a billiard ball, a doll’s head, old fan blades
and turn-signal signs, visors stacked to
look like pill bugs. His commitment
was total. These are works of devotion.
This is where Ramm wanted to live—
at the edge of comprehensibility, but in
a way that invited others to wonder.
Cities are filled with strangers who pos-
sess an unnerving energy, who hail us
with stories, songs, and poems. Ramm
was one of these. In an interview filmed
in the aughts, Ramm sheds light on his
everyday life. Sometimes, he says, he’ll
be walking down the street or sitting at
a bar, and people will just look at him.
And sometimes they’ll come up to him
and ask, “Who are you?” He’s explain-
ing all this while wearing one of his
“Garbage God” masks. You notice his
paunch, the warm crackle of his voice
at rest. “I’m just an average Joe,” he says,
and he sounds like he believes it.