The Man With Golden Tonsils

Rahzel might joke that he has an extra pair of tonsils, but his tonsils are serious business – they are insured for almost a million dollars. With them, Rahzel (Rahzel M Brown) has redefined the art of beatboxing. Using just his own body, he creates full songs, offering up the bass line, the hi hats, the vocals, the melody – all at the same time.

He was a member of The Roots, he has won three Grammys and has worked with artists such as Bjork, Ben Harper and Mike Patton. Lately Rahzel has been taking his skills to the kids, appearing on Yo Gabba Gabba! and Dora The Explorer. His current projects remain strictly hush hush, but he will say that what he's working on now “will definitely evolve beatboxing even further.”

He traces his ability back to a natural knack for innovation formed through growing up in Queens, where he developed his distinct vocal skills through necessity. “You know, because [of] not having the opportunity to have turntables and instruments,” he explains. “Just being active and creative as a kid, you know, that's how a lot of kids grew up. We had to make something out of nothing.”

That constant drive to innovate is what has defined his career. “In hip hop, in pop, in electro, everybody's starting to copy and paste and is pretty much trying to do the same things over and over. Me, I just try to be inventive. This is my career, I'm always in the think tank, how to make things better.“

His mother sometimes tells him to stop and enjoy the career and the life he has built. “And I'm like, I know, I should! But at the same time, it's really hard, especially if you want to maintain a certain level; that's the hardest part.

“Unfortunately for me, good isn't good enough,” he laughs. “I look at it like a legacy and it's like, you have to do more. There's no resource without a struggle, so we have to be in struggle mode all the time. It's kind of a mindset, because if you relax, you become complacent, you really don't ever do much. But when you're in struggle mode, everything has urgency. And being an entertainer, you have to stay in that mindset because the world moves so quickly. You have to be on top of that, and that's a lot of work.

“You're dealing with so much physics. You're dealing with physics because you're dealing with time. You know you're getting older but you still want the same results as when you were younger, so you gotta do all these things to get to that. You gotta deal with the physicality of vocals changing, body dimensions changing, so you have to add that into the equation on top of just being an artist. There's so much you gotta think about.”

Since he started doing it in the '80s, human beatboxing has gone through phases of popularity. Guys such as Doug E Fresh were his contemporaries then, and he has always looked up to Bobby McFerrin. The way he sees it today is that a lot of the younger beatboxers around are trying to be too trendy. “The stuff that I do is more inventive, I really don't do trends,” he says. “It's like – you gotta add on to what it is. You don't just go with the moment. You gotta evolve and let other people think. When it's a trend there's not really any thought, it's just what everybody else is doing. When you are the inventor, people are just now catching up to stuff I did in 1984,” he laughs in his deep, contagious chuckle. “So, you know, to me, it's like okay, you just got that? I did that almost twenty years ago.”

On top of pure skill, what separates Rahzel from the crowd is also his knack for composition, which for him is about connection. “To me, in order to connect with you, I have to compose something that's tasteful to your ears. All the flash and all the gadgets and the gimmicks and the tricks, that's cool, but basically music soothes the soul, so you gotta occupy that time with music that's delightful to the ears, that sounds pleasurable.”

Rahzel will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 5 December - The Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW
Thursday 6 December - Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
Friday 7 December - The Espy, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 8 December - Meredith Music Festival