Ruminations on Rammellzee: “…a couple youtube views and an empty RIP”
R.I.P. Rammellzee
Quite often people ask me how I feel about a particular artist and I answer that I haven't heard their stuff but I could tell by the way people talked about him/her that they were good.
Jay Electronica was a good recent example of this before I actually dug into his stuff. I hadnt paid him any attention mostly because his name threw me off. I know that may seem ironic coming from someone whose name is made up of three words that dont go together at all. But thats what it was...In my mind, a Jay Electronica sounded like a guy that used to DJ gay clubs and decided to rap. I couldnt have been more wrong, but I guess its a lesson in nomenclature (and assumptions). I finally began to check for his music when I read the specific praise words being thrown his way by people who's opinions I respect.
A similar thing is happening now that Rammellzee has passed on.
In this case, though, it isnt that I made any attempt at avoiding his music. Its more to do with the era in which he exists in the history of our genre. I really didnt become a student of rap until 1994. And as ravenous as my appetite for rap consumption was, I quickly found that most of the music that was to my liking was created after 1988. My unsophisticated ears found most of the songs that I heard that were created before that time to be indistinguishable from one another. Aside from Jimmy Spicer's Superrhymes, or Shawn Brown's Rappin Duke it seemed to me that most of it consisted of coked out guys rambling over the same disco breaks over and over again.
"They use the simple back and forth, the same old rhythm/ that a baby could pick up and join right with em"
I can remember suffering through a particular phase of my rap stupidity where I actually told somebody that I didnt need to know about old school, cause Nice & Smooth, Big Daddy Kane, and Biz Markie were old school to me. And while there was some truth to that statement, I was pretty dumb to lump everything earlier together as useless to my hip-hop knowledge.
Its only as an adult that I can appreciate how incredible some of that era's emcees were. Especially now that I can put some historical context around things. When I can appreciate how young it was as an art form, I can see how advanced dudes like Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, and Grandmaster Caz were at the time, even though their patterns and cadences seem basic in this era.
But after all this time, and though all this learning...I dont think I'd ever heard a Rammellzee rap. I was familiar with the name, but in my mind he stood alongside rappers like Superlover Cee, Cowboy, and Spoonie Gee in that even now Im somewhat nervous to admit that Im not all that familiar with their impact.
Death has a funny way of underscoring the contributions of an emcee.
Ive actually written a song about this recently...It seems that we never truly celebrate a rapper until he or she is dead. Maybe its because we dont have the wealth or the media influence to properly document and canonize the seminal works of our own culture, so we have to wait until the mainstream media wants to know who "rapper x" was before we're given the platform to give out our awards.
When I read of Rammellzee's contributions, I feel like I'm being told of a recent ancestor, like a grandfather that died before I was born. I feel like I owe him something more than a couple of youtube views and an empty RIP. At first it feels like I owe it to him and a few more of those who have come before to be more brave in my art..but thats not quite it...bravery is the overcoming of fear...but there really inst anything to be afraid of to begin with:
