Ramdasha Bikceem facts for kids

Ramdasha Bikceem is an American writer, singer, and musician. She is known for creating an important zine called GUNK in the early 1990s. This zine talked about how being a person of color and a girl connected with punk music and skateboarding.

Early Life and GUNK Zine

Ramdasha Bikceem grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s. Her parents loved music and art, which influenced her a lot. She was inspired by artists like Joan Jett, X-Ray Spex, Grace Jones, Lunachicks, Run DMC, and Queen Latifah.

When she was 15, in 1990, Ramdasha started her own zine called GUNK. A zine is like a small, self-published magazine. GUNK focused on topics important to her, such as punk music, skateboarding, feminism (which means believing in equal rights for all genders), and racism.

What Was GUNK About?

Ramdasha published five issues of GUNK. In these zines, she wrote essays about the challenges of being both a Black person and a girl. She wanted to explain how these two parts of her identity created unique experiences.

For example, in GUNK #4, she wrote about being a Black girl in the punk scene: "I'll go out somewhere with my friends who all look equally as weird as me, but say we get hassled by the cops for skating or something. That cop is going to remember my face a lot clearer than say one of my white girlfriends." This showed how her race could affect how she was treated. She also wrote about how the riot grrrl movement, which was about girl power in punk, needed more diversity.

Parts of GUNK were later included in a book called The Riot Grrrl Collection. This book gathered important writings from the Riot Grrrl Archives at Fales Library at NYU.

Music and Other Projects

Ramdasha Bikceem started playing guitar when she was around 14 or 15 years old. She sang and played guitar in a band also called Gunk.

Performing at the First Riot Grrrl Convention

In 1992, her band Gunk performed at the very first Riot Grrrl Convention in Washington, D.C.. A video clip of this performance and an interview with Ramdasha were shown in a 1995 music documentary called Not Bad for a Girl by Lisa Rose Apramian.

Later Music and Art Projects

In 1993, Ramdasha moved to Brooklyn, New York and studied at Pratt University. In the early 2000s, she recorded songs with the band Le Tigre. Some of these songs were released on her own album, From the Desk of Mr. Lady.

In 2007, she released an electronic dance-punk song called "Good News" under the name Designer Imposter. More recently, in 2020, Ramdasha Bikceem created music for an art project by Jonathan Berger, which was a new version of the gift shop at the Aspen Art Museum.