Beatboxing

One area of hiphop that i've always found fascinating, and which unfortunately was overlooked in the lecture this week, is that of beatboxing.

Beatboxing is the art form of recreating percussion and drum beats using only your vocal chords, and in a sense could be seen as the purest form of hiphop. It was created in the streets of New York City in the early 80s by kids who were basically too poor to afford any kind of instrumentation so created the beats for their mates to rap over using all they had, their vocal chords. Since then it has become a large part of hiphop, usually taking a backseat to the other elements of Djing, MCing, Graffiti Art, and Dancing but never failing to be any less impressive.

I remember seeing a documentary called, Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box at the international film festival about 5 years ago and walking away absolutely stunned at the layers of sound someone could actually reproduce using only their vocal chords. 'Scratch' and 'Rahzel' of the group 'The Roots' in particular stood out, as well as pioneers 'Doug E Fresh' and 'Buffy' from the group 'The Fat Boys.' Unfortunately the doco dosen't seem to have gotten any kind of decent distribution as i've never seen it in any video stores and the imdb entry for it only has a handful of reviews, with plenty of comments from people wanting to find out how to get a hold of it. It was a fantastic doco which I enjoyed immensely even though hiphop isn't generally to my taste, so here's hoping it will one day get to reach the wide audience that it deserves.