Bill Murphy

Yes, there are 8 million stories in the naked city, but they’re still not enough to do justice to Rammellzee. A postmodern samurai, sage and saboteur, Ramm—as he was known to friends—spray-painted his first tags on the A line in the mid-’70s. He was a native of Far Rockaway, Queens, but planted his roots in the Boogie Down Bronx, where the nascent hip-hop underground embraced him with open arms. As the Red Bull Music Festival hosts a major retrospective of Rammellzee’s work, his art—which transformed urban decay into a futurist multiverse of image, language, music and myth—remains light-years ahead of the rest.  Early on, he made it clear that he was much more than just a graffiti bomber: His practice weaponized the alphabet (or, in his words, “Alpha’s Bet”) and propelled the art form out of the subway and into distant realms. Take his name, stylized as RAMM∑LLZ∑∑, a mathematical equation. “It’s all 20 different maths in a story,” he explained, rather inscrutably, to Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn in 2004. “It’s quantum, as far as I’m concerned.” His street-born philosophies, Ikonoklast Panzerism and Gothic Futurism, guided everything he created as an artist and emcee until his death in 2010 at age 49. Working from his downtown Tribeca loft, aptly dubbed the Battle Station, Ramm used found objects (such as discarded dolls, old clothes, scrap metal and skateboard parts) to build his customized art: the souped-up skateboards known as “Letter Racers,” the action figures dubb

Two decades ago, you’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of Lee Fields. His career to that point could best be described as a journeyman’s, but as he tells it, that was only because he’d yet to find the band he needed to transmute the emotional, explosive music he felt churning in his soul. Like James Brown, Otis Redding and Al Green before him, Fields had a vision he simply had to make real. “I waited 40 years for these guys,” he says, casting a thoughtful glance around the intimate space at the Diamond Mine studio in Queens where he recorded Special Night, his fourth album with the Expressions, led by multi-instrumentalist and producer Leon Michels. “I knew if I waited, there was gonna be a band, because I tried a lot of other bands. I didn't know what their appearance would be, but I knew that they would come. And I’m gonna tell you, the wait was well worthwhile. I’m very proud of the songs that we’re making today.” At 65, Fields is in a life-affirming groove. He started out in the late '60s as a soul-singing teenager—a Brooklyn transplant by way of Wilson, North Carolina, who emulated his heroes with raw, exciting performances and a rare depth of commitment to his craft. Still, local notoriety couldn’t pay the bills, leading to a long, hard road of chitlin circuit tours, self-released albums and barely missed opportunities (he left Kool and the Gang in the early '70s, just before they blew up). Fast-forward to 1996: Fields meets Desco label head Philip Lehman and bassist-p

When the news broke that David Bowie had died, just two days after the release of his edgy and uncompromising Blackstar, it hit saxophonist Donny McCaslin like a kidney punch. Barely a year earlier, McCaslin and his band had joined Bowie at the Magic Shop studios in Soho to collaborate on what producer Tony Visconti would later refer to as Bowie’s “genre breaker”: a molten slab of trenchant art-pop fueled by high-energy jazz fusion but with a rocker’s soul burning at the center. The sessions themselves were a profoundly life-changing experience for McCaslin, and in his grief over Bowie’s death, he sought to pay tribute. That same month, he took the Village Vanguard stage with keyboardist Jason Lindner, drummer Mark Guiliana and bassist Nate Wood (subbing for Tim Lefebvre), and the band folded a moving version of “Warszawa,” from Bowie’s classic 1977 album Low, into its set. “It was a really intense time emotionally,” recalls McCaslin, “and that tune was an opportunity for us to channel all that emotion and grief into a musical context. It definitely felt cathartic to play it.” Catharsis soon gave way to inspiration. McCaslin started writing new material for the band, and by April the musicians were back in the studio. Beyond Now is the astonishing result; by turns explosive and introspective, it’s the sound of a band stretching out as a living organism, in the vein of groups like Can or Weather Report, while taking a firm hold of electronic and rock influences (with covers of

Relationships are hard work, but for Kevin Barnes, that work has fueled almost two decades’ worth of aggressively original art pop. As the flamboyant founder of the Athens, Georgia–based band Of Montreal, the 42-year-old singer-songwriter has crafted a sprawling oeuvre of surrealistic and often confessional music that draws from glam, prog, psych and punk rock, with overt nods to the Beatles, Queen, T. Rex, David Bowie and Prince. The passing of those last two giants made 2016 a rough ride for an entire generation of music fans, Barnes included. “The world feels weird without their physical presence,” he says. “But at the same time, I still have their music, and they continue to influence me in a really positive way.” It’s an upbeat observation from a guy who’s spent the last two years wrestling with the fallout of separating from his wife, a breakup he began deconstructing on 2015’s raucous, cathartic Aureate Gloom. “There was a long process of finding my footing again,” Barnes admits. “I had to reestablish myself as an individual outside the organism of that relationship.” The next step took the form of a self-imposed exile early last year in Paris, where he fleshed out the broad strokes for what would become Of Montreal’s new album, Innocence Reaches. “I’ve been trying to do that for the last couple of records—just go somewhere and isolate myself and try to be influenced by the surroundings,” says Barnes. “I’m able to disappear from the normal world that I live in and comp