From the Paris subway to London's annual celebration of middle-of-the-road family entertainment, the Royal Variety Performance, NATURALLY 7 took hip hop's fifth element - beatboxing - to more places last year than the mouth-made-music had reached in the previous 20. As the New York-based group finally embark on a major label career, STEVE YATES asks them about defying industry trends, winning over unlikely crowds, and standing in the shadows of Doug E, Biz and Rahzel.
Two different routes to stardom:
Embark on a worldwide tour with a supper-club jazz singer, crash through the planet’s breakfast TV shows and receive the ultimate accolade of mainstream acceptability - an appearance on the UK’s Royal Variety Performance in front of HRH Prince Charles. Or, hit the underground armed only with your voices and a video camera, record a song that leaves rush hour commuters awestruck, upload the resulting video and watch it become a worldwide internet phenomenon.
One is a vision of pop hell; the other couldn’t be more hip hop if you strapped lino to its back and spray cans to its hands; especially since the song with which you stormed the Paris Metro was a reworking of In the Air Tonight by perennial hip hop fave Phil Collins (no hating at the back there) featuring beatboxing, rapping and a lyric about a street murder.
But a vocal group from New York have travelled both roads. Naturally 7, the church-reared septet who’ve spent the last year-and-a-bit warming up Michael Bublé’s audience, aren’t quite your textbook definition of keeping it real, with their a cappella singing and omni-instrumental beatboxing. But, at their core, they’re still hip hop, connecting the doo wop street culture of the ‘50s with its modern equivalent. Ask them about their influences and Biz Markie and Doug E Fresh are writ as large as The Drifters or Frankie Lymon.
"Those two things [hip hop and doo wop] are very close to us," says N'glish, aka Roger Thomas, the group’s founder, the day before their RVP slot. "That a cappella way of guys getting together and singing, that’s very close to hip hop because in every classroom there’d be kids banging on a table, someone rapping over it and kids trying to figure out how to do different sounds on top of that."
While N'glish is every bit the spokesman, there’s little sense of rivalry in the group. They dress and talk in the manner you’d expect of seven hip hop-loving New York men, but for two noticeable omissions - they don’t swear, and they don’t talk over each other (a consequence, presumably, of their church upbringing), at least until rehearsal time when all is a whirr of ideas and conflicting opinions. Originally designed as a singing group, Naturally 7 evolved into something unique when Roger realised his brother Warren’s beatboxing skills could spice up the traditional vocal mix. Bit by bit they allocated other ‘instruments’ - ‘guitarist’ Jamal Reed, ‘bass player’ Marcus "Hops" Davis, a ‘brass section’, and not forgetting Rod Eldridge, the ‘DJ’ - until their style, which they call Vocal Play, was complete.
Naturally 7 make the music with their mouths and, at times, the result is extraordinary. Feel It (their Collins interpretation) blends gut-wrenching soul with a looped groove and a gospel theme that goes way beyond its source material. Wall of Sound has a jazz group’s flair for individual improvisation while staying collectively on-message. Touring the world with Bublé may have left them with a few too many crowd-pleasing covers in their repertoire (Broken Wings,Bridge Over Troubled Water), but they have enough quality originals to avoid the polite pigeonhole traditionally accorded a cappella acts.
What they didn’t have, until recently, was an American record deal. Despite doing some 250 shows back home, they were initially signed to a German label. "We were quite disappointed that our fellow Americans - I’m talking about the label executives - didn’t get it so fast," admits Roger (who, with his brother, was born in Manchester, England but raised from his pre-teens in New York), "because the kids got it right away. It’s taken everyone else a little while to catch up."
"It was so different," explains Rod. "If it hasn’t been tried and proven a lot of execs are too scared to touch it. What is it? How do we market it? That’s why our first CD was called What Is It? The German label said, ‘Wow, you make hip-pop cool.’"
"Now you speak to a record executive, he asks, ‘who’s your audience?’" N'glish adds. "The kids - I mean real kids - love it because you’re doing sounds and that’s exciting to them. The silverheads, people who are over 55, love it because you’re bringing back harmonies from the doo wop era. And the people in the middle love it because they’re looking for something a bit different. So you’re pretty much saying your music is for everybody - and that is a no-no," he laughs.
While they fell foul of the US industry’s rigid niche-mongering, they also eluded the trap set for most hip hop artists who don’t practise one of the only two elements the music marketplace recognises, rapping and DJ-ing. Just as graf painters or breakdancers are rarely more than a sideshow to the main event, so beatboxers have struggled to transcend the esoteric nature of their art and turn talent into box office. Scratch and Rahzel delivered fine records for limited returns, while the likes of Kenny Muhammad and Kid Beyond (who Naturally 7 cite as dazzling beatboxers) generally give recording studios a wide berth. So why would anyone sign an act that needs to be seen in the flesh to really be appreciated?
"The record company guy is changing," says N'glish. "He’s a little different from five years ago. That guy is now going, ‘We really need real artists, we need live shows, something we can put our hands into on that side.’ That’s why we think our time has come. People who are true performers will rise again, you can betcha bottom pound."
Naturally 7’s harmonising opens the way to an audience closed off to orthodox beatboxers, but it also represents something genuinely fresh: a multi-faceted option for an art form that’s always previously been about one man and his trick box. Rahzel’s ability to sing and beatbox simultaneously takes the viewer’s breath away (if not his), but its musicality is necessarily restricted. As N'glish says, "What most people in the hip hop community ask us is why is there no one else out there doing a group. It’s easy to be that solo artist like Rahzel doing a bunch of these things - Rod’s pretty much in that category, he’s doing the beats and stuff - but you take it to the next level as soon as you add a second person. This is why we don’t worry about other people doing what we’re doing: it’s really hard."
That it is. While HIPHOP.COM watches, they work on an interlude to the rhythm of Special Ed’s I Got It Made; the 20-second end product is arrived at only afrter several minutes of frantic rehearsal, and you need only marvel at the layers of a track like Wall of Sound to realise the depths of their mastery. The group may have their roots in street corner improvisation, but the deliberation and professionalism put into it is from somewhere else entirely. The Paris Metro video works precisely because the meticulous delivery is in such stark contrast to the setting, a collision of everyday experience and perfect production values. The guerrilla gig idea wasn’t met with unanimous enthusiasm, but despite fears about not being heard above the noise of the train and being pelted with tomatoes (Hops) or being sworn at by irate Parisians (Jamal: "I’m from New York and New Yorkers are somewhat angry. I thought with Paris being another big city..."), the performance concluded with an instant fan base and a YouTube hit-in-waiting.
N'glish recalls, "When we first came to England, the YouTube video worked for us - ‘Those are the seven guys from the train’ - it went everywhere before us." And in return, Naturally 7 are now taking the fine art of beatboxing to places it can only have dreamt of reaching.
