How to Wreck a Nice Beach

by Dave Tompkins

  While these conversations often end up in apocalypse and malt liquor through a straw, one gets the feeling that my host had been maimed by a spelling bee at an early age, fueling a bitter distrust of Old English and the Overstructure—finished, done or just no more. “I don’t drink for nothing,” he grumbles. “I’m scared too. Man drinks for reason. Fear is math. It goes further and further and faster and faster. Mathematics dictates to all of us. One day, a physicist will hit us so bad with equations. Never listen to poets who are astrophysicists. You may not like what you find.”

  VOLTRON’S ELBOW

  Rammellzee found it safer to listen for garbage trucks. Like the monks of St. Leibowitz, he has been refiguring language from the leftovers of an apocalyptic wasteland: the curbs of Chinatown in Manhattan, before the morning trash pickup. “I still have a lot of garbage. It’s a lot harder to find garbage these days. From bums to rich people to rich bums, everybody wants to keep things now.” In “Beat Bop,” Rammel may have taken K-Rob’s moralizing—“You may as well work at the sanitation”—as a challenge, fashioning indecipherable letters from unwanted trinkets, Tonka mini-monster wheels, doorknobs, a fake candle stolen from the chandelier of an Italian restaurant, nozzles, Voltron’s elbow. These are his building blocks, his broken language. Something from nothing.

  He hands me half a dragon and says it’s part of the letter A. A curve of plastic, once an electric fan guard, serves as a K or an R. Not sure. It’s a tough read. “Why throw it out?” he asks, admiring a loose doll head, a fake lash wink to automatons. “Don’t it look good?” Despite the recent dearth of yo-yos (his favorite), the garbage has been good to Rammel. He calls himself “the Garbage God.” One man’s rubbish is another man’s theory. A quantum crackpot on a recycling binge? Re-fuse? Rammel dubbed his letter systems “Ikonoklast Panzerism,” symbol destroyer, inspired by Rommel, the German tank general who greeted the desert sunrise with a blinding wall of engine noise, his larynx plugged into his radio, while in a basement in Algiers, the vocoder guarded the spoken letter from code-breakers so Winston Churchill could tell his spy to shut up and could cry like James Brown: “Good God!”

  In Walter M. Miller’s sci-fi classic Canticle for Leibowitz, monks in the year 3124 try to reconstruct speech that perished in a nuclear holocaust. (The word lizard means fallout.) “To wipe out a language and make a new one is hard work,” says Rammellzee. “The hours are long.” (illustration credit 11.9)

  THAT WOULD BE A TANK

  “Rammellzee armed the letter so it could defend itself, actually,” Dondi would explain, when the late graffiti legend was interviewed by Style Wars director Henry Chalfant. “He says the Christians put a Catholic symbol on the letter and the only way to destroy a symbol is with a symbol.” Dondi points out the hinges and barbed missiles on Rammel’s armored Z. “This would be a tank.”

  Al Diaz first met Rammel in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s loft on Crosby Street. “There were all these graffiti dust-head parasites satelliting around Jean. But Rammel—he had this theory about Ikonoklast Panzerism. He was sort of a delusional paranoid but he was micro. He had the details—it’s all figured out.”

  “We wrote on the fastest-moving, biggest goddamn underground gallery in the world,” Rammel told me back in 1993. “The idea was to make the letter move without the train. In order for hell to freeze over the letters must race.” I ask what letters he prefers and he immediately says the S and the R. “The R can mutate easily. It can become a K or B. The S can become an L, and, boy, you better be good at math to do that. There are no pictograms here. What I draw and design is architecturally built. And will fly. I race for thunder.”

  In 1988, long after the trains had been sent to the ghost yards for an acid bath, Rammel would cite Dondi’s Sabbath masterpiece, “Children of the Grave,” in an an eight-minute screed called “Lecture.” That’s Rammel on the cover, a pile-up of bee-stung Geordi La Forge shades on his brow, some without lenses. Released on Island Records, Missionaries Moving may have sold enough copies to replace the wicker chair torn up for the cover art. Back in high school, I showed this to some friends—“He’s the one wearing traffic mirrors on his pants”—and played them “Lecture.” While we decided who was going to steal beer that night, Rammel talked about a voice that shot lasers in the catacombs. He called the vocoder a “Tower of Panzerism.”

  For “Lecture,” Gettovetts producer Bill Laswell looped a recording of the Tokyo Bullet Express. Podium became platform and Rammel arrived with a purple suitcase full of watches he designed at the Fashion Institute of Technology (attended, briefly), none of which could tell time from a hole in a worm. (One watch has a nine-millimeter slug expended into its face.) The beat chugs off, vanishing into a horn blurring three stops away, just before he says, “Sneeze with me.” That’s “Lecture.” Definitely not a first-date song, too medieval for the Golden Age of Rap, and curtains for the A&R department of Island Records.

  Part of “Tower of the Apparitors,” for “Theater of War’s Linguistics” (illustration credit 11.10)

  Unfinished letter racer, possibly S, with drag coefficient still at large.

  Traxx, “bounty hunter of diction mutants,” equipped with “brain broiler.”

  “Rammel did that in one take without anything written down,” says Laswell. “It’s powerful if you hear it. It’s coming from the other side. I have no idea what he’s saying and I’m quite sure he doesn’t either. But that’s irrelevant. But the vocoder is way beyond music. That’s the hippest take on the vocoder, I guess. Hippest, esoteric, unexplainable. The monks are in there. That’s an important thing.”

  Gyume Tibetan monks vibrate at 60 hertz, at mdzo levels, a yak low trapped inside a bazooka amp. The technique is ngarskad, “roaring voice of the god of death.” Glottologists know the vibrating gravel as the “vocal fry,” those parched good-morning croaks, scroll-dry. The vocal fry finds an electronic parable in the artificial larynx used by Pope John Paul II after his tracheotomy, a device originally developed by Homer Dudley, who believed his vocoder emulated chanting monks.

  “Real vocoder music is to subliminalize or consciously control or war,” says Rammel, vocal flaps no less cooked. “When I use it, I launch missiles. They want to dance and entertain. I want to war. I’m in the church or the catacomb; these guys are onstage. I’m in a basement; they’re on a stage.”

  Gettovetts, Missionaries Moving (1988, Island Records). Rammellzee with Shock Dell and Delta II. This album tanked. Includes the vocoder song “Go Down! Now Take Your Balls!” The traffic mirrors were acquired from a crosswalk near the NYPD’s First Precinct. (illustration credit 11.13)

  THE GANGSTER DUCK DOES VIENNA

  In 1984, Rammel first encountered the vocoder in a basement in Vienna, rapping about the price of art in a city where the Nazis acquired it for free. According to Rammel, the equipment—a Roland SVC vocoder and DMX drum machine—had been stolen as well. With him was Phase 2, a spray-can art icon who invented bubble letters. “Phase is sittin’ in the corner laughin’ at me and I went ahead and played that shit. He didn’t even know I was an MC at that time.”

  When I asked what it sounded like, he said, “Keyboards that sounded like a fan playing backwards. You push your voice out or you suck in. Sucking it in was better because it gave more power. Instead of the mic projecting, you was the one projecting, sucking the energy out of it. This gave a very deep sound. When you want to push out, you want to go castrated tenor.”

  With Phase doodling cave echo on the DMX, Rammel talked about “crimes of the gods.” “This is a subway war. I kept saying, ‘We will see. We will see.’ Talking about how much art would sell. Because we were there for art, not really for music. And Phase was talkin’ a lot of shit so I talk some shit back.” He named the track “Gangster Chronicles.” Under headphones, the vocoder seems to be chasing him around that basement, just a quack of a shadow behind. There’s a nod to the year 4000, something about food-chain rhythms, and a “devil bomb after dark.”


  “It’s supposed to [sound like a bunch of different voices]. One finger is ten people. Five fingers gave you an orchestra. The echo causes it to be catacombic, church-like. It’s hard to be eighty-eight people.”

  TIME-SUSTAINED DIAPHRAGM

  I came here to jam with my diaphragm.

  — Class A Felony

  Rammellzee’s feelings about the vocoder run gut-deep. “It’s a very special weapon. Not too many people can take it. You have to have the discipline to enjoy yourself. If you don’t enjoy yourself against that weapon then that weapon will attack you and ensure that you are hurt. It can hurt you in your bones, in your joints and muscles. You have to push, even though you’re breathing in. It’s like you’re pumping an engine and it’s been in there cookin’, fireplace debris and shit. To power such a machine is to become the weapon yourself. Lots of people don’t want to be weapons. But I’ve got the guts.” In spring 2003, in Lower Manhattan’s Harvest Studios, Rammellzee nearly lost his guts to the vocoder, rattling his diaphragm so hard he vomited bile in the hallway. He called the song “Pogo” and the vocoder “the gun and the gut.” “That was upsetting,” he says. “That was a little too deep. But the beat called for it. I felt good afterwards. The garbage damn sure came up. Time-sustained diaphragm. Garbage up, garbage out. Eat a planet and go on to the next one.”

  You have to admire the man’s dedication. “You have to hold the note,” he follows, “and know how to vibrate. That’s some sore-throat shit. And if you don’t like sore throats, get out of the game. Get out of the vocoder. If you want to keep your voice, suck in half the time. You’re a machine-man and that is vibration material. It’s all work.”

  QUAQUALUNG LIVES

  You don’t have to vibrate yourself inside out to get a decent vocoder sound, but I’m not going to argue with someone who installed flamethrowers in his sneakers. Apparently Rammellzee learned to punish his diaphragm like a monk while working for his uncle at Marine Moisture Control (MMC). Once a supplier of battleship decks during World War II, MMC now specializes in petrochemical hazard removal and transport. According to Rammel, he was dispatched to an oil rig in the Gulf, where he repaired fissures in pipes that dispensed oxygen to pressurized rooms beneath the coast.

  As a diver, he became acquainted with the bends, the narcosis, euphoria and bad judgment caused by decompression. This can be avoided by inhaling an elixir of oxygen and helium, which has less density than air. Pushing against a gas of low density, vocal cords encounter less resistance and vibrate more rapidly, in higher frequencies. Bell Labs’ Manfred Schroeder calls it “restoration of the Donald Duck.” While at Marine Moisture Control, Rammel ingested his share of the noble gas, cartooning his pitch while scrubbing barnacles and sea slugs, admiring the “crazy stuff floating by.” Yet he learned the Gangster Duck style not from frogman helium but Jahmel, a rapper he’d met at a Far Rockaway Police Athletic League center, where they would change voices and get-ups to trick the cops. (“I owe my life on the mic to that dude.”)

  I’m both fascinated and baffled by the idea of this guy spending time beneath the sea. Rammellzee has always been on good terms with water, having grown up near Far Rockaway Beach. He once hauled some knucklehead kids out of the rip tide, victims of “baloney sandwich cramps.” Yet it’s sometimes difficult to separate the man from the morphology, if not his imagination—as if sub-aquatic compression were a side effect of trying to go sober, surviving the excess of being an international downtown gallery star in the Eighties. This could be a salvage operation.

  Rammel says his teeth chatter and that his eyes still hurt. He is often guarded about his previous life as a diver, though occasionally I’ll get a message saying, “Catch me now, before I go back underwater.” Or he’ll just redact the conversation altogether: “Off record! Off shore!”

  GEORGE AND BOOTSY AT THE BATTLE STATION

  It’s good to bring offerings when visiting Rammellzee. A joint, a beer, an idea, a Willie Stargell autograph, my mother’s Tasmanian Devil alarm clock. Something to take the edge off. One Halloween, I brought a Gill Man head—seasick green and with lagoon dimples. Rammel looked at it (“Hello, friend!”) and planted it in the fulcrum of a nautical steering wheel, in the corner near the toy train with the blue head of Cookie Monster poking from its window.

  Author’s Tasmanian Devil alarm clock and Creature From the Black Lagoon light set. The Gill Man is one of the best Florida exports next to Speakerhead’s 1989 album Booty Shakin’ Breakout. (illustration credit 11.14)

  Another time, I sacrificed my friend Matt, an authority on zombies and compost, who grew up blowing away anthills with shotguns. Matt and Rammellzee would discuss hot glue guns over arugula and cans of Natural Ice. When it came to evacuation procedures in the face of industrial adhesives, they agreed that riding a bicycle out the window was best, though Rammel knew he wouldn’t make the moon. (“I got rocks in my ass like a dinosaur!”) After reaching an impasse about which came first, the word or the void, they thumb-wrestled to Black Sabbath. Everyone’s happy when the wizard walks by. “I always take people up there,” says Bill Laswell. “Anybody I meet who may be able to influence or support Rammellzee. I took Killah Priest there recently. They connected, but it blew him out. Priest was gone.”

  “Rammellzee is a special piece of magic galaxy dust,” said Bootsy Collins. (Left to Right) Rammellzee, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins. Photographed at the Battle Station, circa 1987. (Courtesy Rammellzee) (illustration credit 11.15)

  One of Laswell’s better feats of social engineering was bringing Bootsy Collins and George Clinton to the Battle Station. “I told George I was taking him to meet someone deeper than he was. George didn’t know who he was. Rammel had on the [Gasholeer] suit because it was a big deal. He shot the rockets. As soon as George walked inside he goes ‘Voop!’ and the rocket fell on the ground (‘hssssst!’) and shot into Rammellzee’s kitchen and blew up. George looked into the kitchen and was just like, ‘My man!’ ” “Rammellzee is on purpose,” Bootsy Collins would tell me. “He is a special piece of magic galaxy dust. The Magic Scripulator.”

  “I was demonstrating pyrotechnics off the wrist,” says Rammel. “I wanted flames and all I got was smoke. Very upsetting. They’re exciting people. They kept me up late.” In 1988, the year Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose, Rammellzee met William S. Burroughs in Belgium. The exterminator was curious after reading a Rammellzee screed from Rotterdam’s prestigious Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which included works by Dondi, Futura 2000, SEEN, Lee Quinones and Zephyr: “Hyperbola to parabola to death. Just like a seashell. Hmm. Motion is bad. It’s five on a dime, can you spin it, raise it to nine? I am a gargoyle in argyle socks. Yes, I love syntax because it’s natural, because it floats. It’s like a mountain turning into a molehill. It has to rain for thousands and thousands of years. What is old is old. What is new is very rare.” “They finally met in Belgium,” says Laswell, who arranged it. “I think Rammellzee was bumming pot off of him and [Burroughs] said something like, ‘How does it feel to be dead and still here?’ It was like an incredible, minimal exchange.” According to Rammel, they talked about where the species was going. “You meet brilliant people briefly,” Rammel grumbles. “And all we wanted to do was smoke marijuana.”

  RIP CORD REX

  We are the centuries. We are the chin-choppers and the golly-whoppers, and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head. We are your singing garbage men … chanting rhymes that some think odd.

  — Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

  “I can put the mask on and I don’t have to worry about it being a song sung by a crazy guy, or some girl, or a lizard or some welder, a duck, a race driver, an eraser.” The first mask he built, called the Rammellzee, has as many jaws as it does sunglasses, a mad welder’s realization of a sawtoothed speech wave. Two jaws protract like H.R. Giger’s Alien. Another has four-sided fangs, a starfish wearing a retainer. Next jaw: comb teeth. The lowest jaw has a goatee bristling w
ith spikes. It detaches into a fist of iron knuckles, sanctioned by some medieval wrestling federation. The leather handle is cut from boxing headgear. Rammel has trouble reattaching it. The glue is parched. “Everything is falling apart,” he says. “But I like the dust. The dust is gothic, word.”

  Many things end in “word” around here. Word—hip-hop’s affirmation of truth. The word here is stound: a moment in time, also a sharp pain and a thrill. Stound is nearly impossible to use. In print, it’s a typo. To the ear, it’s amazement misheard. “What a great word,” Laurie Anderson would tell me. “Everything is in that word. When you see a word in a film you don’t say it. It comes to your eye in such a different way if you turn off the sound. It’s a silent literary world. By sound, the word stound is totally different from seeing it.”

  If word is bond, then Rammellzee is sniffing the glue that holds it together. The smell is the truth. Sometimes the truth stinks. Sometimes you can’t be in the same room with the truth. The neighbors complain. The fire department arrives and issues fines, glue fines. Still, the glue must go on—just about everything, it turns out.

  One mask has a strand of dice drooling from its mouth. Another has a race track for a hat, saturnizing his head. Somewhere, an umbrella is missing its nose, a hair clip goes hungry and a chest of drawers walks around blind. A bicycle seat painted white is a goat’s face. Or it looks like a goat’s face. You have to be careful around here. Start looking into things and things start shooting back. A stereo speaker just tries to fit in, its woofer crying for help.