Pepouni has set himself up to continue his rapid growth without bringing any more attention to himself. Whether by design or by happenstance, Pepouni has surrounded himself with a strong cast of characters to serve as the outward face of Swissbeatbox while he guides the ship from behind the scenes.

While Bee Low wears ostentatious yellow tinted glasses and MCs with a Flava Flav size hourglass, Peponi defers MC status to 2012 Canadian Champion Scott Jackson. Bee Low features in his own promotional videos, Pepouni’s promotional appearances are few and far between. The promotional videos for Swissbeatbox’s upcoming World Beatbox Camp spotlight old-school beatboxing legends, national champions, Grand Beatbox Battle champions, a World Champion, but not Pepouni. He has the flexibility to rely on his beatboxers to promote themselves, and when he cannot … BBK.

With BBK as hype-man, Scott Jackson as MC, and other familiar beatboxers serving as the outward face of Swissbeatbox, Pepouni is free to spend his time focusing on the technical issues. Along with another team of beatboxers cum producers, Pepouni is able to churn out high quality video content on a daily basis. Pepouni works alongside co-founder Kilaa (back end coding), Madox and Chezame (filming and video Editing), Sinjo (audio mixing), and Trung Bao (artwork), finding new talent and organizing Swissbeatbox events.

As beatboxing has grown, Swissbeatbox and Pepouni have assumed stewardship of the burgeoning movement in the day-to-day. Pepouni has set an infrastructure in place to carry beatboxing through its current period of growth and through further growths as well. With Pepouni at the helm, Swissbeatbox is beatboxing culture’s present and future.

Bee Low and Pepouni have encouraged and nurtured the beatboxing community over the past decade and a half, taking it from small local clubs to international stages. Still, for all their impact on beatboxing, they don’t beatbox. Time and again they set the stage for another group of innovators, the beatboxers. The third element of the Beatbox Battle World Championships -music — will ultimately be its defining characteristic.

From Boots ’n’ Cats to Lip Rolls

Anecdotally, it seems that Americans think of a capella music when they hear the word beatbox. They might even think that beatbox is two words (gasps!!). Until I met the Orthobox, a beatboxer from Delaware who participated in the American Beatbox Championship, I had no idea that beatboxing served a purpose beyond keeping time for collegiate a cappella groups. In truth, internet beatboxing was not so different from vocal percussion until the early 2010s, but there were some 2000s era beatboxers pioneering the sounds that would define the future of beatboxing.

If you were beatboxing in 2007 you were a true believer. Bee Low had only just hosted the first Beatbox Battle World Championship, and not even under its own name. Few countries hosted their own national championships, and beatboxing’s patron saint, YouTube, was only a year old. Despite the odds, a young kid from Swindon in the UK found his way to beatbox, and decided to give the peculiar percussion art a try.

Dan Lowes was just ten years old in 2007, but he had already learned the basics of beatbox — boots ’n’ cats. (If that phrase is unfamiliar to you, take a minute to say those three words in quick succession a couple times.) Most beatboxers start on their own then look on YouTube to learn from professionals. In 2018 there is a small cottage industry of tutorial videos, but in beatboxing’s early YouTube days aspiring beatboxers only had battle videos to learn from. The 2005 Beatbox Battle World Championship Final videos were uploaded to YouTube in late 2007, but battle videos are not conducive to learning new sounds.

Lowes would later assume the stage name D-Low, but in 2007, he was just a kid named Dan learning new sounds from the few low-fi videos he could find online. In a 2017 video he uploaded to his YouTube channel D-Low tells the story of how he came to the lip roll — a sound that would not feature in mainstream beatboxing culture until the mid-2010s.

Ten year-old D-Low saw a video of a UK beatboxer so memorable that he couldn’t remember the guy’s name. D-Low wanted to replicate a lip oscillation from the video and wound up with a different one entirely: a lip roll. Others would independently discover the lip roll and its many variations, and now in 2018 it is nearly impossible to compete without them. This technique is so advanced that one amatuer beatboxer told me that if you picked a beatboxer at random from the 2018 Beatbox Battle World Championship pool and dropped him in the 2005 or 2009 Beatbox Battle World Championship they would win, entirely due to the lip roll.

Here’s the thing. D-Low might have skipped from boots ’n’ cats to lip rolls, but if you want to understand beatbox in 2018, there is a lot to cover before lip rolls.

It might be that if D-Low had tried to learn lip oscillations from a higher quality video he would have properly learned them instead of stumbling into lip rolls. In the early years of internet beatboxing, even the videos from the major competitions were grainy and low-fi, but they were often the best a beatboxer could find. And after the first Beatbox Battle World Championship, every beatboxer worth his salt was learning from the runner-up, Roxorloops.

Even today when every beatboxer is armed with lip rolls, they go back to watch Roxorloops sets. Relative to his time, Roxorloops had enough special sounds, but his bread and butter was producing clean replications of a drum set. In other words, the best boots ’n’ cats around. His drum kit beatboxing was crisp, and he would tastefully sprinkle in a special sound like throat bass or humming under the beat on occasion. Roxorloops’ trademark cleanliness is now in vogue among many beatboxers. Today’s videos are full of crisp, full sounds that you can pick out from a beat.

The other early beatboxers also influenced the beatboxers of today, but their impacts are harder to see. Many of them assembled a collection of sounds and their sets would simply be a display of each sound in order, whether or not the sounds made sense together. Beatboxers still value their special sounds — they often differentiate a beatboxer from his or her peers — but the sounds have to fit within the flow.

Flow is a nebulous term. Generally, it refers to continuity in a beatboxer’s rhythms and sounds within a given set, but one is hard-pressed to find an accepted definition for flow in a beatboxing context. What is certain is that in the second and third Beatbox Battle World Championships, flow was established as a key component of internet age beatboxing. The three finalists from the 2009 and 2012 finals — ZeDe, Skiller, and Alem (Skiller appeared in both) are incredibly technical beatboxers. With a sprinkling of unique sounds, these beatboxers stand out because they construct unique beats that are fast but don’t sacrifice structure. Skiller and Alem, two masters of flow, spent the final round of their 2012 matchup debating who had better flow by trading beats in the challenging 78 time signature.

While flow was taking hold of the beatbox scene, another UK beatboxer was innovating on a different plane and creating sounds that would inspire the Swissbeatbox beatboxing generation.

Reeps One is so distanced from the mainstream beatboxing scene that a new beatboxing fan could easily mistake him for a has-been. A semifinalist in the 2009 and 2012 Beatbox Battle World Championships, Reeps One retired from the battling scene after 2012 and has avoided the spotlight since. Reeps One, aka Harry Yeff, will be serving as a jurist for the second straight Beatbox Battle World Championship this August and hasn’t uploaded a single video to YouTube since 2017, but at the height of his competitive career, Reeps was a champion and innovator, and he remains a luminary in the beatboxing and greater musical communities.

Reeps One is widely credited for bringing dubstep and other deep bass sounds into the beatboxing scene. The two time UK beatboxing champion spent his competitive battling years expanding the ways beatboxers can incorporate melody into their compositions.

When you think about beatboxers who were able to defy conventional wisdom about what sounds a person can and cannot make with his or her mouth, there were some beatboxers like Pulpo and Rahzel who took sounds that everybody can make, and made them at the same time. Reeps One made sounds that prior to him were thought to be beyond human capabilities. In his legendary 2016 Grand Beatbox Battle showcase NaPoM declared that his Reeps One influenced technique would “take you to another dimension.”

When Reeps left the battling scene to pursue a broader music career he had changed what it meant to be a cultured beatboxer. A modern beatboxer who does not have dubstep, inward drag, throat bass, and so many other Reeps sounds in his or her arsenal will be left behind.

The second generation beatboxers took Reeps One’s lead and found many new ways to incorporate melodic elements into beatbox. On occasion Reeps would pop in and drop a comment on the musical sets that inspired him. When Gene Shinozaki from the USA posted his wildcard entry for the 2015 Grand Beatbox Battle to wide acclaim, “Reeps One approve[d] this message.” Similarly, Reeps congratulated D-Low on his 2015 Beatbox Battle World Championship Showcase, saying D-Low “did the UK style proud.”

In 2016 Reeps One was a resident scholar at Harvard University, and he told a class of Phonetics students that the most liberating part of beatboxing is discovery. With this is mind, it is likely that Reeps One takes more pride in the fact that after he left the scene beatboxers continued to innovate. For a long time, a small group of beatboxers workshopped an inward lip oscillation: the lip roll. Reeps One’s fellow UK legend Ball-Z, Markooz from Spain, Ibarra from the Netherlands, D-Low, and NaPoM all featured lip rolls in sets, and for a time it was just another sound. Some beatboxers used it, others didn’t. Then NaPoM changed it all with one legendary showcase.

It was too poetic. NaPoM started his earth-shattering showcase with a minute and a half of the last generation’s sounds, then pushed beatboxing into the lip roll era with two and a half minutes of unrelenting lip rolls. The race to the next level was on. NaPoM was there, the question was who would join him. As he announced mid-flow, his showcase was “just the beginning.”

Lip rolls quickly assumed the same status as dubstep style: if you couldn’t lip roll you could not be a top-level beatboxer. This year’s Beatbox Battle World Championship will be a referendum on the lip roll after three years of artists workshopping the sound on Swissbeatbox. Setting aside Alem, whose aggressive no-holds-barred style will certainly stand the test of time, it is likely that every beatboxer who advances to the knockout rounds will feature lip rolls throughout their sets. Still, beatboxers can’t rest on their laurels, and the beatboxing community finds itself in the middle of another revolution.

Comment on a D-Low video

Some of D-Low’s earliest videos on YouTube are beatbox covers (the earliest, Sail by Awolnation, is definitely worth a watch). Beatbox covers always have an audience. Even though covers often don’t have great flow, people are fascinated by the idea that one person can sing and make the beat to a song at the same time. From Pulpo to Rahzel, beatboxers have impressed the masses with their ability to defy common perception and sing an entire song by themselves.

In the past year, original compositions like Gene’s 2015 Grand Beatbox Battle wildcard have become increasingly popular. Trung Bao performed an original song on VTV1 in Vietnam, Bigman from South Korea performed his viral hit Get Tired of My Love on The Ellen Show, and Codfish from Australia won the 2018 Grand Beatbox Battle with mostly covers and original compositions.

Some of the singing beatboxers will not feature in the Beatbox Battle World Championship until 2021 (assuming there is a 6th Beatbox Battle World Championship. Bee Low has not yet committed to hosting past 2018), but with Gene, D-Low, Trung Bao, and many other musical beatboxers in Berlin there will almost certainly be melodic elements in the showcases and battles.

The truth is that the solo artists could take out all musical elements and have an hours long kick/snare conversation and the 2018 Beatbox Battle World Championship would still be the most musical yet. The tag-team and crew battles are going to be music heavy, and there will surely be a rendition of Cotton Eye Joe, but the first Beatbox Battle World Championship Loopstation battles will provide enough music for the entire championship.

If Loopstation sounds familiar, that’s because live looping machines are also used in the mainstream music scene. Looping machines allow artists to record multiple tracks that play on loop and incorporate them into a larger composition, all without the help of any other musicians. Ed Sheeran uses a live loop pedal at his concerts to play without a backing band and to harmonize with himself. An article titled “The Birth of Loop” suggests that musicians have been looping since the early 1960s, but competitive Loop Station beatboxing is a fairly new idea.

There is a video of Tioneb, a French beatboxer who is among the favorites for the loopstation title this August, looping in a battle back in 2012 for a little known Loopstation title, but mainstream beatboxing competitions first embraced the loopstation in the 2013 Grand Beatbox Battle, and they established the current format for loopstation battles for the 2014 Grand Beatbox Battle. The alternating rounds in the battle are the same as in solo rounds, but they are a minute longer to accommodate the elaborate arrangements needed to make a good loopstation composition.

2016 Grand Beatbox Battle Loopstation Champion Thorsen (who has entered the Beatbox Battle World Championship as Blu Lippy) once said that he views himself as a singer-songwriter, and his voice serves as his instruments. The tag-team and crew battles are often more musical than the solo battles, because while one person sings, or imitates an instrument, the other partner or group members can maintain the rhythm. But even the crew sets that most resemble a capella music do not hold a candle to the elaborate and melodical loopstation sets.

Loopstation compositions are inherently intriguing because the artists show viewers how they compose their songs in real time. Restricted to one sound or rhythm at a time, beatboxers expose the guts of their songs as they assemble the harmonies, beats, and other layers to their songs. In a time where there is a huge appetite for videos explaining how songs are made, loopstation songs are one retweet from blowing up. Rolling Stone’s video of Charlie Puth dissecting his hit song Attention has 5.4 million views as of the time of this article’s publication. Since 2016, Genius has hosted Deconstructed, a video series where producers explain how they made a hit in under ten minutes; the series has 64 videos and millions of views.

In the 2017 Grand Beatbox Battle, Thorsen covered Rae Sremmurd’s hit single Black Beetles in a quarterfinal matchup against Penkyx from Belgium. The video already has 1.4 million views, but imagine how quickly Thorsen vs. Penkyx would blow up if Swae Lee of Rae Sremmurd retweeted it. The novelty of live song composition combined with powerful, exciting music and competition is a recipe for virality.

Swissbeatbox’s loyal commenters think that music is the cutting edge of beatbox, and Madox agrees. As the video editor for Swissbeatbox, he sees the best of the established stars and the innovations of the new talent. “Pop beatboxing,” as the Orthobox affectionately calls this musical version of beatboxing, is the likeliest to go viral, be it is a solo, tag-team, crew, or loopstation performance.

Viral videos are not just a barometer to measure beatboxing against other YouTube fads or the key to beatboxing’s breakthrough into the mainstream. They are often the entry point for new beatboxers to join the beatboxing fold. In the past, beatboxing videos that gained traction were not necessarily at the forefront of beatboxing innovation, they caught on because the beatboxers packaged basic beatboxing techniques for novice audiences. Super Mario Beatbox would not make waves at the Beatbox Battle World Championship, but it has over 43 million views.

The new wave of musical beatboxing stands in opposition to this trend. Musical beatboxing is simultaneously the likeliest type of beatboxing to explode onto YouTube’s homepage and the frontier for beatboxing innovation in 2018. Some musical beatboxing video — it could be either loopstation or solo — is going to change the game for beatboxing like Stephen Curry did for basketball. After Curry’s 3-point record shattering MVP season, the entire basketball youth circuit changed. Young players across the world began to shoot 3-pointers like Curry, replicating the style of the man at the top of the basketballing mountain. Young beatbox fans see Codfish winning the Grand Beatbox Battle, Berywam covers getting millions of views, and Saro composing loopstation masterpieces, and want to replicate what they see.

From boots ’n’ cats to lip rolls and beyond, this has been the story of sounds in beatboxing. There has never been a static beatboxing sound, it’s evolved from competition to competition, and from generation to generation. Boots ’n’ cats begat flow which begat dubstep beatboxing which begat the drop, which necessitated the lip roll which has inspired musical beatboxing.

The great beatboxing philosopher BBK once said, “We as humans evolve. Why do we evolve? Because we beatbox. As beatboxers [we] evolve.” As long as there is beatboxing, there will be evolution.

A State of Elevation

After quarterfinals, semifinals, showcases, and a Winners’ Ceremony, the last night at the Beatbox Battle World Championship will be capped with an afterparty. As new world champions celebrate, and the beatboxing world basks in their glory, imagine two men, off to the side, sharing a moment.

A young fan sees the two and wonders what they could be discussing. These two men made everything possible. It was their vision that made the beatboxing community a reality. Their effort built the championship from nothing to what it is today. Perhaps they are planning something even bigger.

But instead of planning, instead of patting themselves on the back, they too are basking in the new champions’ glory. Because while they are the architects of the whole beatboxing world, they are just beatboxing fans at heart.

The moment is short lived, as the one of the men walks off to prepare buses to World Beatbox Camp. Though he wishes they could celebrate a bit longer, the other man knows that there is no time to waste for beatboxers. There is only up. A constant state of elevation.