Rammellzee

Rammellzee was a visual artist, gothic futurist "graffiti writer", painter, performance artist, art theoretician, sculptor, and hip-hop musician from New York City, who has been cited as "instrumental in introducing elements of the avant-garde into hip-hop culture". Since 2021, Rammellzee's work is exclusively represented by Jeffrey Deitch.

Rammellzee was a pioneering hip-hop artist who pioneered specific vocal styles in the early 1980s. Some consider his 12-inch single "Beat Bop", co-written with rapper K-Rob and featuring cover art by Basquiat, to be the most valuable hip-hop record of all time. Rammellzee has influenced artists such as Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. In 1985, he also wrote an opera called "The Requiem of Gothic Futurism", "offered to send some of the intelligence he had gathered for national defense", and "tried to promote his ideas by producing a comic book and a board game".