Rammellzee
Rammellzee on vinyl is so impossible to come by. This is my original copy of "Beat Bop" which I found in a car boot sale in Camden for 50 pence.
I remember round at Stuart Argabright's appartment him showing me the Death Comet Crew "At The Marble Bar" record (which truly is as much Stuart's record as Ramm's) and him practically cradling it. It really is a lovely sleeve design, a real visual relic of that era. Jim Clarke was particularly lucky and picked up a copy a few years back for five pounds. I paid a bit more for mine. You can get the tracks off this on the excellent "This Is Rip Hop" reissue CD which I reviewed for The Wire.
The "Death Command/Lecture" disc might even be the rarest of the lot. Kodwo mentions it in the back of "More Brilliant than the Sun" and I despaired of ever finding it. Damn, what a weird fucked up record! Rammellzee MCs over the longest. most obtuse, skronky "rhythm track" (if you can call it that) in history. There's a lot of those slightly antiquated synth stabs, but nevertheless it's very cool. I don't often make lazy comparisons, but Scott Walker does Rap just about nails it.
Rammellzee is a hell of an interesting character. The reason he's up first in this monstrous Hip-Hop-a-thon (which I'm now going to add notes to, finding just pictures wholly unsatisfying) is that he not only lays the aesthetic foundation for the Golden Age of Hip-Hop, but also for its mirror image, the legion of Non-Hop interventions.