ALI

Marc André Edmonds (December 20, 1956 – April 18, 1994), also known by the graffiti name ALI and as J. Walter Negro, “The Playin’ Brown Rapper” was an American artist and musician. As ALI, he is best known as the founder of 'Soul Artists' and originator of the cult of Zoo York. As "alter-ego" J. Walter Negro (a cynical take-off on the arch-commercialist J. Walter Thompson advertising agency), he is remembered as the lead singer/songwriter of the proto-hip-hop-rap group 'J. Walter Negro and the Loose Jointz', who had some success with their 1981 release "Shoot the Pump".

Career Born in Manhattan in 1956 to an African American father, Edgar Overton Edmonds (1926-2002), and Seneca mother, Charyl Edmonds Romo (1928-2004), Marc attended public school on the Upper West Side with future noted graffiti artists SAMO (Jean-Michel Basquiat), Futura 2000 (Lenny McGurr), and COCA 82 (Pablo Calogero). He began street-tagging in 1970, and with his younger brother Michael, founded the early crew The Underground (UND). He went on to found the Soul Artists (SA) to describe the absurdity displayed in the attitudes of New Yorkers during what he called the Sick Seventies. It was the name he gave to a subway tunnel being built underneath the Central Park Zoo at the time, which became a haunt of graffiti writers in the early 1970s. The tunnel's naming occurred one night in early 1973, after several members of The Underground (UND), ALI, FINE and CRUNCH attended a showing of National Lampoon Lemmings, a new musical-comedy review at the Village Gate in downtown Manhattan. The show (which starred future comic notables John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest) lampooned the Woodstock Festival that had taken place in upstate New York four years earlier, calling it "Woodchuck" and equating the entire hippie generation with lemmings bent on self-destruction. The crew of teenagers made similar comparisons between themselves and the residents of the nearby city zoo. Noting the perversities of contemporary urban psychology, ALI proclaimed New York City itself "not new, but a zoo!"

"Shoot the Pump" In 1981, as street hip hop and rapping mainstreamed to popular music, ALI formed a band he named J. Walter Negro and the Loose Jointz,