Rahzel Helps The Southern Gul Lay Hip-Hop Roots

by Tia Ja'nae

During one of the best year of my life, my sophomore year in college, I ventured into Fourth Street Records and came out with a max-single (yes, they did those back in them days) of Erykah Badu’s Southern Gul. It was one of those rare moments that as soon as the first five seconds of the song started I was excited. Nobody was putting out beatboxing backed tracks in the late 1990s like that. This is almost fifteen years from Doug E. Fresh doing The Show and ten years from The Fat Boys having hip-hop cred, so the expectation of having a beatboxer in the bling era of gangster rap was null and void.

I must have played the song fifteen times in a row over and over!

From the moment former The Roots member Rahzel started beatboxing as Badu followed his vibration in a weird combination of rapping, singing, and talking, I was all the way in. Badu was in rare form, rustling on cadence and hitting all her bars in an eclectic hip-hop serenade that few artists have been able to pull off since. Keep in mind Badu was known exclusively as a singer, with one successful studio album and one critically acclaimed live album to her credit at that point. She was hot on a thing in those days, and people jumped at copping her records. Mama’s Gun, a controversial release that excluded all her radio hits, didn’t come out until the winter of 2000, so this was all we had from her.

Southern Gul was so fire it would hold hardcore fans up for twenty years!

The girl from D-A-DOUBLE-L-A-S ain’t no stranger to live music nor sampling; her first two releases sampled heavily from artists like Bobby Caldwell, Bobby Byrd, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and others. This approach to her artistry would come full circle in later releases but during the era of Southern Gul, which she released as a standalone cut, was Badu’s official intro into the hip-hop continuum as a lyricist. Younger cats might know her hip-hop work now but Southern Gul was all before the release of Brown Sugar, before the mixtapes, before she was DJ Fat Baby Bella. This was Badu rocking the head pieces and singing about apple trees, Tyrone, on and on.

Just to point out to keep it one hundred, I had no idea about Rahzel at the time. Southern Gul was my introduction to him as well. I did not know he was a former member of The Roots (having just left the group after Things Fall Apart) or that this single was featured on his debut album Make The Music 2000, with the latter part being something I just found out recently. None of that takes away Rahzel’s genius, but I just want to give some transparency of how I discovered the cut at the time.

Southern Gul is the southern hip-hop we needed then and still need now.

Beatboxing, even in 1999, was a lost dying art. Southern Gul brought it back to its purest form, with an award winning performance by Rahzel making all the music with his mouth that easily sounded like a live band. To add smoke on the fire is Badu’s delivery; hip-hop, even in the late 1990s, didn’t feature content that promoted vegetarianism, dropping tea on record sales, chanting in a southern dialect, and going through a whirlwind of southern history that could raise an eyebrow or two in this day and age as Critical Race Theory. The end result is a single that has aged graciously, that can get even the GenZers that are used to mumble mouth rap bopping to the beat like its second nature.

Motown, Badu’s record label at the time, should be ashamed of themselves for buying the single.

Motown Records was in the toilet at the time, languishing in a shadow of their former greatness. Badu was only over there via her deal with Kedar Massenburg, having graduated fully to Motown by the time Southern Gul hit. Though only featuring three versions of the single, Southern Gul had the potential to turn the label back into a powerhouse of music, and finally exploring the untapped potential of hip-hop they looked over for the most part. For those old enough to remember Motown Records only briefly dabbled in rap; Biv 10 Productions acts such as Boyz II Men, MC Brains, and Another Bad Creation were pretty much it on the hip-hop swing side of things, and that was almost ten years prior. Badu, sporting a southern grill with her name encrusted in bling, sets the tone for this hip-hop classic and what should have been Motown’s new direction.

Instead, they wasted an opportunity to get back to the top of the musical heap. Nonetheless, Southern Gul  has survived better than all of Badu’s later mixtapes and guest appearances, and remains a time honored hip-hop single that grasps on the cusp of what could have been instead of what was if Motown Records had younger executives pushing the creativity of their artists into a fresh direction.