Rammellzee

Of Hip-Hop's many-splendored Four Elements, writing holds the patents to several "firsts": first Hip-Hop medium to fully flower artistically, first to blow up in the global marketplace of goods and ideas, first to accept those of non-African descent as creative forces first to be commoditized and corrupted, and first to be criminalized by the powers that be. Graf also has the distinction of being the Hip-Hop element most difficult to identify by its proper name. Graffiti begat graf, for short, but the people who pioneered the form called it "writing" from the git-go, though "aerosol art" and "subway art" were also once seriously floated as alternatives. The art form's most brilliant theoretician, the late Rammellzee, went so far as to give it not one but two art-historical names of his own invention: "Ikanoklast Panzerism" and "Gothic Futurism." These follow from his beliefs that writing was an exercise and evolution in the art of warfare, whose stylistic direction he thought derived from the 14th century Gothic monks who'd developed the complex calligraphy we know today from Illuminated manuscripts.