The Beatbox Battle World Champs are dead. The Beatbox Battle World Champs have arrived

Berlin, Germany; Standing on stage at the Gretchen Club, resplendent in a cream track suit, Bee Low confirmed to an audience of a couple hundred what insiders had known for months, the Beatbox Battle World Championships as they have been known will be ending this weekend.

During one of a handful of ad-libbed speeches, this one to introduce a panel of event organizers from across the world, Bee Low dropped a bomb. The audience should pay attention to the panel, he said, because these organizers are the future:

"My dream is to have country organizers organizing World Champs and to bring World Champs once a year to countries all over the world."

SpeshFX is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The audience, a largely young crowd, cheered, although a more appropriate reaction might have been to gasp. The World Championships in Berlin have represented the primacy of European beatboxing on the international stage in the 21st century, and their infrequency — the event has been held every three to five years — suggested that an international event at the scale of the World Champs was only sustainable every few years.

With this announcement, Bee Low seemed to say that beatbox is well past the point where it can sustain major events each year, and well past the point of needing a hub in Berlin to put on major events.

For anybody who has been following beatboxing over the last five years, these words will not shock you. As long ago as 2018, Pepouni and Swissbeatbox have been speaking about hosting the Grand Beatbox Battle in different countries. That this announcement from Bee Low comes in the same year that the Grand Beatbox Battle is set to leave Europe for Japan cannot be underemphasized.

Throughout all of Bee Low's speeches, he took thinly veiled shots at Swissbeatbox. There has been much toxicity, he said, much hate. 

"Money comes and goes. Community is strong," he said in one speech. In another, he said that "it is the time for the international beatbox community to stand up and say we are a community," heavily implying in that moment and throughout the night that those who had tried to steward beatboxing since the last World Champs care only about money and little for community.

On a number of occasions Bee Low bragged that he put on the World Champs despite it putting his organization deep in the red financially, as if to suggest that his penury makes him more legit than other organizers. 

The Expo

Aside from the speeches, the first night of the World Champs was rather tame. The first two hours were dedicated to a beatbox expo, a sort of industry fair for organizers and educators to sell their wares.

Only four groups registered for tables, and two of the tables were affiliated with Spanish Beatbox, who brought a large contingent of fans, competitors and organizers. At the first station, a developer named Ivan Garcia showed off a beta for a judging app — ironic, because later in the night, Bee Low and a panel of three judges manually picked names out of a hat to settle the elimination order. 

Garcia said he and his partner at Spanish Beatbox hoped their table would "bring awareness of the app to organizers and judges" who could use the app to run their events more smoothly.

At the other stations, two educators showed off beatbox card games, another sold his beatbox lessons book, and Lyre Beatbox, a beatbox education organization, tried to get students to sign up for their academy.

Fans filtered through the expo, but at any given moment, the majority of attendees were in the smoking area outside the main hall, where Bee Low had set up a freestyle stage for any beatboxer to perform for their peers.

It's unclear if the side stage negatively impacted the groups presenting at the expo. I hope to have more info about that later in the week.

New Possibilities 

On the competition front, the first night was meant to have the new vocal scratch and best sound categories, but after some delays, Bee Low elected to delay vocal scratch by a day.

Instead, he focused on the sound effect competition, which was meant to be a freestyling competition of sorts. Bee Low urged a handful of competitors onto the stage, and asked them for one sound. With crowd voting (and maybe a little input from the host and MC himself) the group of about thirty was whittled down to ten. 

This group was then tasked with an on-the-spot challenge, to tell a story with sound effects alone. The resulting performances were theatric and comedic, uses for beatbox that Hobbit told us just a few weeks ago are great for entertaining corporate gigs.

One beatboxer mimed a phone call, another a scene from Jurassic Park, and PACMAX, the two-time French tag-team champion, used his trademark train whistle to act out a train heist.

Pacmax said the night's relaxed energy and Bee Low's active hosting allowed him to perform "with no shame" despite the silliness of the new style of competition. 

Pacmax and four other beatboxers were selected by crowd vote to advance to the finals, which Bee Low decided in real time would take place on the main stage on Friday. One of the competitors was not an artist in any other category, and Bee Low had to call security to get him an artist pass.

Takeaways

The word of the night, said Bee Low, was "reactivation." COVID-19 forced them away from live events, but Beatbox Battle TV was "never gone." 

Over the next few days, it will come to light which of these things are true. Does this global organization need a boost? The light attendance and widespread changes suggest the answer is yes. But the insistence on framing the event as a community building moment rather than a coronation has always been at the heart of Beatbox Battle TV events, and that hasn't changed one bit.

Today are the solo eliminations for men and women, and that's when the rubber will hit the road. Word is spreading that contestants and judges who are supposed to be performing today won't make it in time — spreading because Bee Low and his team hold meetings in the common area of the hostel — but they are pivoting rather smoothly. Replacements are stepping up, and Bee Low is excited.

Speaking just before leaving the hostel for the Gretchen Club to lead sound check, he told me that "yesterday was a little disco trick. Today begins the big show."

I’ll also be sharing audio versions of my articles this week on Lace. You can download here or at the link in my Instagram bio: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lace-audio/id1620790725