The Weaver's: A Short Interview with Rammellzee

“We control your icons. We wrote them on your trains those big gigantic rolling pages...”

-Rammellzee, interview, Style Wars 2004 edition.

I first heard of The Rammellzee through my friend Chuck Galli, who interviewed him for a paper titled “Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity.” Chuck directed me to Zee's website, where can be found the cryptic treatise/equation that the artist's name embodies, as well as some sculptural representations of the godheads who, as Zee sees it, fight for the domination of language.

Rammellzee has been active since the late seventies. As a member of that founding generation, he was and remains uniquely sensitive to the power of symbols and signifiers to generate and destroy worlds. Hip hop is a war of symbolic communication, and like a savant or kabbalist, Zee understands alphanumeric units not as pure abstractions, but as souls, and soldiers:

“The letters are weapons. Instead of Orson Wells stating that...the books will be burnt. The books will stay there. The letters have left the page. And once it went up the letter had better be ready to fly.”

-Rammellzee, Style Wars 2004 edition.

So, here is the interview:

[SC] You seem to have a unique understanding of language and its hidden powers.  And I am curious how you would describe your relationship to language, whether as a sculptor, emcee, whatever...

[RZ] The "Weaver's" have it! ZeeOut.

[SC] The Weaver's!? Who are the Weaver's, Zee?

[RZ] We are...and the others that migrated from the burnt out, bulletins, schools, fuzz,death. ZeeOut.

[SC] That reminds me of a verse I wrote once,

'Learn to weave, and time will bend for you,

it is a different art from drawing lines.'

Hard to put a finger on, but 'weaving' involves a different kind of consciousness than 'delineation,' which is the mode in which man-made environments, texts, works of art are usually built and experienced.  

And the tension between the two, as when an artist weaves over linear surfaces or spaces, as with subway graffiti and certain styles of rap, can be explosive.  What do you think?

[RZ] As like in the Gothics or the webs Futurism. z.

[SC] You know, language has been standardized to an amazing degree in the past few hundred years, thanks to the extension of public education, bureaucracy, communications networks.  But language, if left to its own devices, evolves very quickly, as evidenced by the many 'bastard' dialects that branched off from Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire.  

"Standard English" is basically a closed system.  There are rules of grammar, spelling, even pronunciation...which prevent us from changing it in any lasting way.  But there are some people who the forces of standardization do not reach--the young people of the old South Bronx, for example. And my question is, do you think this apparent disadvantage can sometimes free people to innovate or even restructure language?

[RZ] Due to the fact that in hip-hop or rap music, which are definitely 2 different things. Hip-Hop is for fun, rap is a mug shot for gangsters and war and pimps. Both are always business men or wombed-man. Emotionally it is impossible for the subject as slanguage. For if a white man can act like a black man but has forgotten that letters themselves were once racists by volume and diction. A black man thinks he owns A-Z and this rhythmic culture now noticed by the white man, makes the white man look impotent since Gutenberg's printing press and the Clergy.

White man thinks he has invented something called respect by disavowing the language of our language tree by thinking that the black man regurgitated from white man's indo-european germanic dialects.

[SC] People have probably asked you this before, but what do you think was the role of the five percenters in the development of hip hop culture?  Especially maybe from 1974-79, what you describe as “a war era, where knowledge formed about by itself through the body, in the dark, underground.”

[RZ] There was none. It was about Math and the Mapamatics of the body.

[SC] Where were you during the blackout of 1977?

[RZ] Madison Avenue. Zee OUT.

A Quick Intro

These pages explore the relationship between youth culture and the built environment of the South Bronx of the mid-to-late 1970s.  My initial thesis was that the experience of shock and displacement that characterized life in the poorest sections of the borough also informed the aesthetics of rap, graffiti, and break dancing.  Free from any anxiety of influence, early hip hop was unique among twentieth-century arts movements for its ability to re-present the here-and-now mimetically, ecstatically, and to transcend the banality of ghettoized life thereby.  

As it happens, the here-and-now of the old South Bronx was a dystopia of epic proportions, as well as a kind of allegory for all kinds of modern/postmodern crises both political and personal. “It is as if the Bronx,” writes Marshall Berman, “in the depths of its disintegration, came to symbolize the twentieth-century world.” [1.]  In recognition of this, I also consider what the lower borough’s collapse meant, if anything, to the metropolis and the nation.     

In a few posts, especially "The Spectacle of the Ruins," "The Valley of Ashes" and "Back Story / the Cross-Bronx Expressway," I discuss the postwar history of the borough leading up to the emergence of hip hop. Readers interested to know more might want to start with Jill Jonnes' South Bronx Rising and Evelyn Gonzalez's The Bronx.

Enjoy!



[1] Marshall Berman in his introduction to New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, ed. Marshall Berman and Brian Berger (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 19.

Thoughts on Wild Style

"In some cases, when a people are freed from their past they are given an opportunity to start anew. Hip-hop, like its African American creators, is born of this newfound independence. It is our generation's opportunity to start from scratch."

- Saul Williams in The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip hop

I saw Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style back-to-back with The Fire Next Door, the documentary noted on a previous post. Both are rich in footage of the old South Bronx, but those environs read very differently from one film to the next.  Fire Next Door documents the arson epidemic and the deadly mix of social/political problems of which fire was the most graphic symptom. The ruins as presented by Moyers call to mind the words scrawled on a project wall in Camilo Vergara's photo essay The New American Ghetto: "Help Me, Motherfucker."  

Those same ruins fill the frames of the proto-hip hop musical Wild Style, but they appear transfigured, charged with a strange power, outside of quotidian time and its imperatives.

Miles of burnt-out buildings and rubble heaps where kids played obliviously, '80 blocks' from midtown glitz--for sure, that was a failure of civilization, a failure specifically of American civilization to uphold its professed values, and people should know about it.

Nonetheless, the kids who actually lived that experience implicitly resisted the victim label that postwar liberalism stamped upon them. This was the constructive flipside of youth's conceit, and it informed the spirit of early hip hop culture.

Grandmaster Caz:

"Look past the garbage, over the trains,

under the ruins, through the remains,

around the crime and pollution,

and tell me, where I fit in,

South Bronx, New York,

that's where I dwell,

and to a lot of people its a living hell,

full of frustration and poverty,

but wait, that's not how it looks to me,

its a challenge, an opportunity,

to rise above the stink and debris,

you gotta start with nothing and then you build..."

- "South Bronx Subway Rap," Wild Style soundtrack

Wild Style condenses that youthful energy like a great poem, and re-presents the South Bronx as an enchanted place, however fraught with danger.  Look past, over, under, through, around...

***

To parallel the material disinvestment that occurred the South Bronx in the sixties came a disinvestment--for the middle classes at least--of meanings, memories, and the emotional attachments that make buildings more than just brick and mortar.  To outsiders and emigres, the South Bronx became a hieroglyph, a tabula of forms without any certain function, a grid-map of places without names.

The wasteland that remained presented itself as an invitation to creatively-minded kids--to  inscribe new meanings onto the artifacts of a vanished civilization; to re-arrange, re-mix, or break them.  This was the context of hip hop's development, "a challenge, an opportunity" to re-claim the uniquely human power to name, the lack of which normally renders the poor invisible. Seizing this power,  the progenitors of hip hop opened a site of revolutionary possibilities, and created art from within that void at the very center of civilization.

A.O. Scott writes that Wild Style "captures the utopian glimmerings of an era that is generally remembered as the darkest in the modern history of New York."  Indeed, the beauty of the movement that the film represents was its ability not to efface but to deflect that darkness, to relate to it as the mud in which creative genius seeded.