Beatboxing: A growing art form in India

By Puja Gupta 

New Delhi, June 7  Beatboxing is perceived as a skill inspired by Western countries as it is one amongst the five elements of Hip Hop. But beatboxing is all about rhythm and vocal percussion. Indians have been exploring the limits of vocal percussion with Konakkal for years, the oldest classical vocal percussion technique, says Rajkamal, well known as Raka Vee, founder of BBXINDIA.

“Therefore, beatboxing/vocal percussion is not something new in our country but the techniques to learn beatboxing is very unique,” he says.

In recent years, the number of beatboxers in the country has been growing very fast where kids and youngsters pick up the lessons from Youtube. As per the poll conducted by BBXINDIA team in the year 2019, there are more than 800 beatboxers who consider themselves to be a professional performer, he points out.

“It is a wonderful feeling to see how the young generation is picking up this artform just from Youtube lessons and start competing to a professional level in a very short period of time. You don’t need anything else other than love for music, and some real confidence in yourself. That is the beauty of this art form.”

BBXINDIA aims to provide an official platform to all the beatboxing artistes by creating awareness about the greatness, benefits, and value of this art form. The artiste further plans to provide the right education, the right direction for all the beatboxers who want to pursue this art as a full-time profession.

Amid the lockdown, it recently held an Online Beatbox Competition ‘BBXINDIA Zonal Crusades’ on the Discord voice server.

“Our team had the sure idea to motivate them by creating healthy competition amongst the artistes and rewarding them for their creative spirit during tough times such as now. Hence India was divided into four zones as North, East, West & South with three different categories — male solo, female solo and loopstation, where artistes represented their zone and showcased their talent to put points on the table,” he informs.

The current World champion Alexinho from France judged the male solo, Vice World Champion; Inkie from Russia judged the loopstation category and D-Nice from USA judged the female solo category.

The idea behind the event was to introduce the new concept of Zonal team spirit, he says. “India having so many different languages we found that there was a lot of division inside the states and the small beatbox communities and we had a reason to unite them with the same spirit,” says Raka Vee.

(Puja Gupta can be contacted at puja.g@ians.in)