Fab 5 Freddy remembers he met Rammellzee “around 1979, just as I was hitting the art scene, and I saw right away that he was brilliant. He invented his own method of expression with graffiti -- his own language, an outrageous urban form of communication." Vivian Goldman has rightly compared the way he lived his complex artistry to Sun Ra, both being experimental, cosmic, and unintelligible in turns. Goldman quotes Fab 5 saying  "Rammellzee would pour resin into square or rectangular molds and embed different objects in it that expressed his cosmic worldview. He would talk about letters in three dimensions, using metaphorical terms, describing elements of individual letters as 'armouring,' and the arrows we used in Wild Style graffiti as shooting missiles."  

According to Suzanne Mallouk, when in New York, Ramellzee took Basquiat uptown to meetings of the Five Percent Nation, but Basquiat never took to that ideology. Fab 5 introduced Rammellzee to Basquiat, who "fell in love with him and took him to L.A.”

Basquiat’s studio assistant, Stephen Torton, took a number of great photos of Rammellzee and Basquiat in Los Angeles, one of which can be seen here. 

In December of 1982, Basquiat flew to Los Angeles to prepare for his upcoming show at Gagosian. He brought his friends from the graffiti world Rammellzee and Toxic with him (Torton drove out and met him in LA). While there he produced the rap record “Beat-Bop,” featuring Rammelzee’s unique nasal “slanguage,” and designed the white on black cover. Basquiat’s painting Hollywood Africans memorializes this trip, with portraits of Basquiat, Rammellzee and Toxic.