Beatboxing
Beatboxing, which many consider the fifth element, is the vocal percussion of hip hop culture. It is primarily concerned with the art of creating beats, rhythms, and melodies using the human mouth, but its modern incantations include a vast array of other aspects as well.
What follows is a comprehensive foray into the art of beatboxing, beginning with the general, and working its way to the specifics histories of important epi-centers of the artform throughout the world. Though born in NY, the fifth element is currently experiencing a second-wind that has carried the artform across the world. The largest, interactive beatboxing community congregates on http//www.humanbeatboxing.com founded in 2002 by UK beatboxer Alex Tew, aka A-Plus. Beatboxers in different areas have used this site, and the internet in general, as a means to meet in person forming important clusters that populate Europe, and certain area of the U.S.
Beatboxing Defined
Beatboxing is the vocal percussion of hip hop culture. It is primarily concerned with the art of creating beats, rhythms, and melodies using the human mouth. However, it can also involve singing, vocal scratching, the imitation of turntable skills, the simulation of horns, strings, and other instruments, and the replication of a vast array of sound effects.
The words "beatboxing," "vocal percussion" and "multivocalism" are sometimes used interchangeably, but originally, and in some ways still are different schools with different influences, and techniques, and rhythmic repertoires.
Vocal percussion is more commonly associated with a cappella groups, whereas 'beatboxing' and 'human beatbox' are terms usually associated with hip-hop or other urban music genres. Multivocalism is a relatively new term, coined by the UK's Killa Kela, to describe the collective use of beatboxing, singing, sound imitation and fundamentally anything vocal used in a musical sense. The boundary between the first two has been blurred, of course, as their practitioners have informed each other, and have become graduates from both schools. Pioneering vocal percussionist, and beatboxer Andrew Chaikin, aka ?Kid Beyond,? has discovered a space somewhere between the two that stupifies some of the greatest beatboxers around.
On the streets, beatboxers serve as human beat-machines oftentimes providing the rhythmic backbones on which MCs lay their flows. On stages, many beatboxers have, and still do, serve as human jukeboxes organizing their routines as medleys of well-known songs. As the art form has evolved it has extended its reach to include physical theater routines, and has integrated itself into hip hop (and other forms) of theater. Beatboxers with backgrounds in vocal percussion stand in for drummers, and percussionists in theater ensembles, live bands, and other line-ups. Some even beatbox into instruments such as harmonicas, such as Yuri Lane, panflutes, such as Radioactive, and one Tim Barsky has mastered doing so through a classical flute achieving several simultaneous streams of rhythm, and melody. And at least one
