Rahzel

Essential Festival 2000 review

The Godfather of Noize. The super emcee. The human beatbox. Not your Doug E Fresh, or your Biz Markie style beatbox, but a new school beatbox who does shit with his mouth that you can't imitate in the playground. Along with talents such as Click tha Supa Latin and our very own Killa Kela, Rahzel is taking a neglected part of hip-hop to a new audience, both on wax and at live shows. With his contribution to The Roots' albums and his own solo one last year, he has built a reputation that explained the turnout to check him out in the hip-hop tent - it was packed.

After a protracted wait while DJ Jas One fixed his turntables and the crowd yelled impatiently, Jas got things underway by demonstrating why he took such care setting up his tools with a baaad cutting and beat juggling routine. Rahzel then engaged in some classic hip-hop call and response with the crowd, before dropping a couple of tunes from last year's 'Make the Music 2000'. So far, so good - Rahzel is a competent rather than a great rhymesmith and so we were still waiting for the main course, which he duly served up. He started off with a DJ battle - beatboxer vs. DJ, with Rahzel imitating with his mouth everything that Jas One did with his hands, including scratches and beats (separately and simultaneously) as well as a vocal backspin. The contest got increasingly complex as the crowd got increasingly hype, Rahzel taking all the honours as far as we were concerned with his super-sharp mic control.

Rahzel has long used a robotic alias to explain his inhuman talents, and he went through a body-popping robot transformation on stage before letting go with his full range of beatboxing skills. His sampler-like ability to replicate any noise is breath-taking, even before he complicates it by doing combining them and simultaneously recreating the beats, bass line and melody of any kind of tune. He showcased an ill dancehall medley routine, running through note-perfect copies of different ragga tracks and imitating the voices of different artists - I picked Bounty Killer and Mr. Vegas from the mix. He then finished this off by bringing New York chatter Mad Lion on to bust an acapella version of his '95 track 'Shoot to Kill', with Rahzel doing everything else. He finished off this section with an R'n'B routine - singing falsetto and beatboxing simultaneously while the crowd, having been losing it for some time, went absolutely bananas.

Finally, he gave the heads in the crowd what they wanted by performing the Pete Rock produced banger 'All I Know', and then soaking up the biggest cheer the hip-hop tent generated all day for what was a virtuoso performance. Rahzel is awesome - a great entertainer and a uniquely brilliant beatboxer - if you didn't know, now you know, so recognise the 5th element of hip-hop, baby.