He’s the hip-hop Bobby McFerrin. Well, not as cheesy but definitely as magical with his mouth. “I don’t consider what I do just beatboxing because that makes it limited,” explains Scratch as he enters his label Ropeadope Records’ offices in NYC. “I say crazy vocal abilities.” Just check his first track with The Roots, “? Versus Scratch” for proof of the insanity. “I came up with the title of my album, The Embodiment of Instrumentation a year before I did anything on the project. I wanted to make the title come to life. It’s self-explanatory. The Roots were out with Things Fall Apart, Rahzel was about to drop his album and I was thinking that I wanted to do something creative, something different, something of my own apart from The Roots projects. This is for people who don’t know who I am or what I do.”

Scratch does more than make music. He’s on a mission. “I want to bring out beatboxing as an art more than people have ever accepted it,” he points out. “People always treat it as a here or there thing and never give it true appreciation. It’s an art form that started along with hip-hop when the hip-hop foundation was first created. I grew up a part of that but a lot of listeners didn’t experience the old school artists and all that hip-hop music history. All they know is what’s being spun around the radio now.” Many rap devotees would consider this a shame. “Hip-hop inspired me in the late ’70s, early ’80s, early ’90s and then the inspiration stopped. The art form became less appreciated. It was an expendable type thing like the way it is now, like microwave music. You pop it in today, pop it out and it’s hot for a second. Artists like Kurtis Blow, Eric B. and Rakim, Run DMC