Apiento flagged this up years ago, `fessing that this is where he took our name, and it`s just been re-issued, licensed for the first time with the original art work, liner notes and in a pressing of 1, 983 copies. I picked up the commercial Profile 12 from Groove Records when it was released in 1983, blind, and deaf, the selection most likely based on RUN DMC being on the same label. It was like that. I did not know what to make of it when I got it home. I certainly wasn`t happy. I played it, tried to scratch with it, ran it backwards. I had no idea who Jean-Michel Basquiat was, and I wouldn`t have made the connection between drugs and the mix, or the Mudd Club link to Johnny Dynell`s Rhumba Rock. It just sounded so unlike what I was expecting it to sound like. Newcleus it ain`t. Hashim it aint. Cybotron it aint. It didn`t even have a break on it. A few years later, Basquiat and Ramm:Ell:Zee both wound up being extremely important to me as they helped to crystalize and make accessible ideas that I was exposed to while reading William Burroughs. Ideas about cut-ups, symbolism, language, and control. Pieces as magic, totems. To repel ghosts. Burners as gateways, the dozens rebuilt as armour and missiles. This record is unique, a one-off, a document, art, all of these, and it has also turned out to be the most Hip Hop thing I own.

Get Funky in the place.