Jean-Michel Basquiat [Producer and Cover Art]; Rammellzee, K-Rob [Lyrics]

Produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983, and originally intended to include the artist on vocals, Beat Bop, features a gritty, ten-minute rap battle between K-Rob and Rammellzee, a multi-disciplinary graffiti artist and musician whom Basquiat exhibited alongside in New York/New Wave in 1981 and later commemorated in his seminal work, Hollywood Africans, 1983 (Whitney Museum of American Art). 

In his 2013 account of Beat Bop in Spin, Profile Records founder, Cory Robbins, recalled, “It didn’t follow any rules. It was long and it didn’t have a hook. It was so free-form. There’s no record like it.” Music was a central tenet in Basquiat’s life and art.  Beyond DJing at the Mudd Club and performing with his band, Gray, Basquiat incorporated titans of the jazz era into his art, anointing them heroic status in his pantheon of imagery. 

As a keen historian, Beat Bop, is a play on bebop, a type of jazz originating in the 1940s and associated with Charlie Parker, a musician that features in Basquiat’s paintings from this year. Basquiat brings the same complex layering that defined this genre to his cover art for Beat Bop which is replete with the hallmarks of his most famous iconography. Basquiat literally crowns the achievement of TEST PRESSING VERSION # ONE VOLUME # ONE and crosses out BEAT BOP twice, a device he often deployed to direct his viewer’s attention. The power of this project is conveyed in the thunderbolts and explosive BANG, cribbed from comic and cartoon vernacular.