Rammellzee & K-Rob – “Beat Bop“

from Beat Bop 12″ (Tartown, 1983)

For those who have yet to hear, avant rap and graffiti legend Rammellzee passed away on Tuesday. Details still are hazy at best but it appears to be a sad truth. Ramell always maintained that the word was a form of mathematics and there’s no series of equations that could properly do his life justice. I tried at the Village Voice but don’t think I came close to doing him justice. He was a legend in two games and probably the single most unique human I’ve ever been blessed to have an awkward phone conversation with. As such I’m bumping the said conversation below.

To me the most fascinating part of this interview was not the mythological Rammellisms – the tale of crumbling up Basquiat’s lyrics, the live-performance-as-bank-heist theory, the dentistry aspirations – but rather when he began to crack jokes about his wife getting on his case. It was like he briefly became Al Bundy, a victim of domesticity. That’s was what seemed incredible about interacting with Ramm – for someone who was always wearing masks and worshipping mechanics there was also a vast amount of humanity right there on the surface. Or maybe he was just a robot trying his best to seem human. One other funny interaction that didn’t make the final edit but I think was sort of indicative of where Ramm’s head was at: halfway through the conversation he told me he only agreed to do the interview because he thought it was going to be with Nas, the rapper. This is odd because I set it up via email, so the pronunciation similarities should have been overshadowed by the spelling difference. I suspect this was another instance of his deep deadpan humor but I can’t be entirely sure.

Hit the jump to read the Q&A, which first ran here on 4/24/08 and then check the Tumblr where a full scale Rammellzee tribute has been going down. (more…)

Part one, in case you missed it.

How did you feel about the other artists coming out of the bass scene at the time?
I think Miami does not have a sound right now… Oh you said back then? Back then I was excited because we had a sound that you could identify Miami with. It was the bass sound it was uptempo it was what we created and you had other artists around here piggybacking off of what we were doing and they were doing really good. Not on a national level but on a regional level. Then you had 69 Boyz and they were doing good on a national level and you had Quad City doing good when they did the Space Jam movie. that was a major movie for them and that was a bass record. I was really excited about the sound and the sound was something that you identify Miami with. You know that was southern music, that was the only southern sound at the time. We were the only ones from anywhere else that was really doing something. I mean you had Jermaine Dupri in Atlanta but he wasn’t really doing nothing southern. Only person in his camp that was really doing the southern sound was Lil Jon. Not in ‘88 but a little later on. The sound was there, you heard a bass song you thought of Miami. (more…)

It’s been a minute since I’ve reached into the vaults, so here’s an old Luke interview, no pegs attached. It was originally conducted on 5/6/08 for the same Vibe retrospective that I also interviewed Too $hort for. As with that interview, the focus is Dirty Rapp in ‘88, but then veers off in different directions. Too often 2 Live and Luke are left out of the conversation, even in wake of the Southern rap explosion. This site is as guilty as any other, so let it be said now: Luke gave birth to your favorite Southern rapper. Hit the jump for the Qs and As. (more…)

This is the third and final installment in the Roc Raida memorial interview series. Here Raida’s longtime X-Men/X-Ecutioner partner Rob Swift remembers their time together.

How did you first meet raida?
I met Raida at the 1991 preliminaries for the East Coast DMC regional battles. Basically that was the first competition that I was getting into so I walked up in there with my mentor, the guy that helped me prepare for that years battle, Dr. Butcher, who has worked with the likes of Kool G Rap, Akineyele, so on and so forth. So I was entering my first competition and all the X-Men [were there] you had Steve D, Johnny Cash, Diamond J, Shawn C, other friends of theirs were there with them as moral support and Roc Raida. And the thing that I found really interesting about Raida was that everybody at the preliminary battle, all the X-Men, they were all loud and drawing a lot of attention to themselves, laughing, joking, just being really loud. And Raida was just really quiet. I remember he was the quietest one out of all of them. That really intrigued me and he stood out on that way. He was really quiet. And then when he went on stage and went up for his slot to try to place it was like watching another person. He went from this quiet guy who wasn’t drawing any attention to himself, that was really observing what was going on, to this beast on the turntables. That was the thing about Raida that struck me the most. (more…)

The second in a series, Percey Carey pka MF Grimm speaks on his history with the late, great Roc Raida:

Noz: How did you first meet Raida?
Grimm: We met when we were teens. I met him through Lord Sear, I grew up with Lord Sear and I wanted a DJ. I said I needed the best DJ in the world. Lord Sear was like, well then you need to meet Roc Raida. And that’s how we got together. I had to actually battle to be Raida’s MC. It wasn’t a walk in the park. But were friends ever since. We were teens and we knew we were the best at what we did, you couldn’t tell us nothing. He was a brother to me, more so than music. Music was just the medium. (more…)