The Coolest Covid-Era Battle Innovations

I was in the car on the way to a battle of sorts when COVID hit in earnest. I was en route to cover a college basketball tournament—my first ever—and just as I pulled into the stadium parking lot, my editor called to tell me to turn around. The plague had arrived and I needed to go home.

It would be well over a year before I attended a basketball game or beatbox battle again, but in the interim, those worlds continued to push forward. Professional and college basketball in the US bubbled, moving behind closed doors on the back of costly daily testing regimes and televising games for at-home audiences. Without nearly enough funding to support large testing programs for in-person events, beatboxing was forced to move completely online, which led to some very compelling results.

Though some parts of the world are still lagging in their vaccination rates, the majority of the countries where beatboxing is popular have returned to in-person events and a new, post-vaccine, normal. The 2021 GBB set the tone for large-scale, in-person events, and since then, smaller events across the world have followed suit. Countries like Ireland and the United States that hadn’t hosted national championships returned in 2022.

So while the online-only days are over, it is worthwhile to look back on a few of the many pre-vaccine battles to highlight a handful of innovations that either are here to stay, or should be. 

Hey friends! Quick editor’s note. In two weeks, SpeshFX is going to be free just once a month, but I will be writing three stories each month. If you are a free subscriber, I’m so happy to have you, but just a heads up, two of every three articles will stop here for you!

That means you won’t see most of the main article, any of the event recaps, or the ever-updating list of beatbox events and associated wild card competitions. Such a shame! Lucky for you, it only costs a few bucks a month to get the rest of the articles. And—woah!—would you look at that? There’s a subscribe button right here! Anyway, enjoy the articles, it’s great to have you, and I hope you’ll support independent journalism by being a paid subscriber with SpeshFX ;)

Live Streams

The obvious move when people were forced to stay home was to replicate the in-person battle through a video chat. Within a few months, some of beatboxing’s biggest players had hosted live battles through digital rube goldberg machines composed of Skype, Zoom, YouTube, Discord, Instagram, and other video tech, streaming, and chatting platforms.

With help from DKoy and Beatbox Community, the 2020 Grand Beatbox Battle went online; Beatbox Community hosted the Online World Beatbox Championship; Beatbox International hosted the International Throwdown; Mad Twins hosted Mad Meal, and there were many more. 

The livestream battles offered the closest facsimile of a live battle, with the chat box functioning as a crowd, and battlers taking 90 second turns in ABAB style with little break in between. There were latency and sound issues, of course, but the broader package worked, and battles didn’t have to stop. 

In addition to keeping battles alive, one big impact of the online battles was the addition of commentary. The 2020 International Throwdown featured YouTube reactors So Close To Toast and McKoy TV, and soon other battles added commentary elements as well. When the GBB returned in 2021, Swissbeatbox borrowed this too, adding a commentary team for the livestream on their YouTube channel.

This innovation was simple, and continues to bear fruit for the online community. I’ll be talking about the state of the online battle soon in an article about the 2022 Online Worlds, but here I’ll share that DKoy feels he only just got the hang of live streaming battles for real. His events are smooth now, and the overhead cost of an online battle is smaller than an in-person battle by a factor of hundreds. 

In sum, the online battle will always be important for the development of new beatboxing talent. By virtue of necessity, the beatboxing community learned how to host a high-quality event through video chat platforms, and that will only serve the community in years to come, offering young talent real battle experience without the costs of a live event. 

Asynchronous Battles

The true innovations came when organizers stopped trying to replicate the in-person battle, and set about creating new asynchronous battle experiences. At home battling presents myriad concerns. Asynchronous battles remove the latency issues of live-streamed battles, and each of the three asynchronous video battles I’ll highlight below emphasized one additional positive aspect of distance battling.

American Beatbox Odyssey Online Showcase Battle

Hosted in May 2020 by American Beatbox, the Odyssey Showcase Battle was a survivor-style showcase competition. In American Beatbox’s words:

Instead of two competitors matching up head-to-head, like in a bracket-style battle, Odyssey OSB is a knockout-style battle where only the best of each round move on.

The beatboxers were ranked within each round and assigned points inverse to their ranking. The top 50% artists in terms of points advanced each round. Each round was slightly longer than the one before, and the points were cumulative, meaning artists needed to bring a cohesive package of music instead of best/worst rounds. What’s more, this is a clean break from the standard 90 second structure of battles, a healthy reminder that beatboxers can and should make music of all lengths.

The artists submitted their videos privately to American Beatbox, which allowed the hosts to release the rounds as one compilation video, already placed in order of the standings. The format of the battle kept at-home viewers on their toes, and the compilation-style drops were eminently watchable. This knockout style would also be great for an in-person event, unique among COVID innovations. 

The shortcoming of this battle, however, was in the disparities in audio quality between competitors. Some of the Odyssey battlers had studio-quality recordings, and others beatboxed into their phones, and in other asynchronous battles, this became the top-line points of emphasis. 

Swissbeatbox: Kickback

Of all beatbox organizations, Swissbeatbox was best positioned to host an event that emphasized sound quality. Drawing on their longtime relationship with audio equipment companies, Swissbeatbox designed Kickback to sound like a battle hosted entirely in a recording studio. 

Swissbeatbox hosted solo and loopstation Kickback battles, partnering with DPA and Roland to provide battlers with mics, audio cables, an interface, and, in the loopstation edition, a prototype of the brand new Boss RC505-mkii loopstation. The events were asynchronous, with contestants pre-recording 90 second battle videos and sending their audio to Sinjo, Swissbeatbox’s head of sound, to be mixed and mastered before release. 

Without the confines of a strict back-to-back ABAB format holding them back, some contestants expanded their videos to include skits, and immersive video experiences to complement the musical compositions. 

Two years after the first Kickback battle began, the form is ubiquitous, and copycat battles abound, including Loop Insider, Beatbox to World, and our final entrant, Beatbox United.

Beatbox United (BBU)

The BBU was a fairly derivative event, following in the footsteps of Swissbeatbox’s Kickback Battle. Beatboxers made original tracks and accompanying music videos, which were submitted on a specific timeline, and judged by organizers Sxin and Chezame. The only live element was a YouTube premier of each battle and judging video. All the videos were pre-recorded, which encouraged the participants and hosts to emphasize production value. 

In addition to the event’s derivative nature, it was the subject of an unnecessary controversy when Sxin and Chezame inexplicably welcomed a beatboxer who is credibly accused of sexual assault into their event, and doubled down when called out. Eventually, they removed the beatboxer in question from the event, but the whole ordeal put a damper on excitement around Sxin and Chezame as community builders. 

Nonetheless, the BBU deserves attention for three reasons:

1. Payment Structure
2. Judging Categories
3. Videos

The first two reasons are beyond the scope of this article, and I will definitely discuss them in the future. But in short, the BBU distributed over €37,000 distributed to the top-16 beatboxers—an enormous sum in the beatbox world—and judged battlers with points awarded across a group of categories, rather than simply voting for one beatboxer. Both are notable, but the third is truly innovative.

With beatbox living on YouTube, videos have always been part of the deal, but the BBU is the first big battle to add video quality to the judging criteria. Sxin and Chezame offered their video editor to all competitors at their own expense to encourage the competitors to make ambitious music videos, and they delivered. The videos added a whole new narrative element to the routines, and were tremendously engaging. 

The primacy of the GBB as the main avenue for beatboxers to amass followers has kept beatboxers focused in the past, but it has also served to limit creativity. The music videos made by BBU participants are better resume lines than a battle video. The studio recordings accentuated the musical details, and the high-quality video made the tracks especially viable for social media. 

As beatboxers look for ways to build their brand, and not just the institution of beatboxing (read: Swissbeatbox), they can look to the quality and success of the BBU videos as evidence that there are strong resume building opportunities outside the context of in-person battle videos.

***

A decade into beatboxing’s rapid growth, there is a possibility things are getting stale. You see this reflected in the addition of new competition categories at the GBB and World Champs, in the beatboxing NFTs, and in the fact that reaction videos are beatboxing’s biggest growth area. All these moves underline the reality that the beatboxing world needs freshness.

COVID pushed beatbox organizers to innovate. They changed things out of necessity, developing new skills, and thinking outside the box for the first time in a long time. Organizers would do well to remember that spirit of creativity, to keep using these new forms, and to continue innovating beyond the standard ABAB battle.

The vitality of the scene depends on that freshness.

Recent Event Roundup

There were a number of exciting Beatbox Events in recent weeks. Today I’ve got reports from two of them: The Aloha Beatbox Battle and the 2022 Irish Beatbox Championship.

The Aloha Beatbox Battle, which was organized and hosted by 2022 American Beatbox Champion and Hawaii Beatbox founder Pono. The battle went down on January 7th at Māʻili Beach Park, and we’ve got a brief recap from Ghost, one of the three judges at the event.

The Aloha Beatbox Battle was an absolutely amazing event. It took place outdoors in Māʻili Beach Park. There was the nicest view with the palm trees, the beach, the ocean. All of it took place outdoors, with some of the most talented bee pouches in Hawaii, as well as some of the most talented beatboxers from the [USA] mainland. Kindo won both the solos and tag team battles with his partner DKoy. 

It was just an incredibly high level of talent. Overall, it was a really great time, great community great vibes. I recommend that people check out the battle videos once they start coming out on the Hawaii Beatbox Channel on YouTube. 

The 2022 Irish Beatbox Championship, which was the first Irish Championship since 2018, nearly didn’t happen. Zach Brosnan, who would later MC and place second in Solos at the championships, said to himself that “no one else is going to do it [put on the champs], unless I just make it happen. And we need Irish representation on that world stage,” so he went about making the champs happen. (During the event he had to pass MC’ing off to another competitor whenever he battled, which provided a few moments of humor during the livestream.)

This is a regular occurrence in the beatbox community, especially when community organizers leave the scene. If there isn’t a purposeful transfer of ownership of the championship from leader to leader, the champs can fall to the wayside. I covered this first in episode 4 of the SpeshFX podcast, and again now with the Irish Champs.

As recently as late November, the Irish Beatbox Association hadn’t secured a venue, but with just a couple weeks left in the year, they secured the Sound House in Dublin, and Zach texted everybody to make Wild Cards. (Next time he can email me and I will include the wild card dates in this newsletter lol.)

When that announcement went out, Zach told me “everyone went crazy in all the group chats, and people were calling me like ‘what?? you're joking!! No, this isn't happening.’” But it was. Ireland crowned a new solo beatbox champion for the first time since 2018, and, for the first time ever, they crowned a loopstation champion.

Online World Champion Osis took home the solos, and LA is Ireland’s first-ever loopstation champion. I’ll let Zach take it from here.

The Irish championships this year has a number of really cool highlights. We had our first ever loopstation battles.  Five years ago, this wouldn't be possible—this year, we made sure it happened. And we have our first ever Irish loop station champion, LA, going to the world stage in August.

The championships hadn't happened in years, so people really gave it their all this year. It was as if they weren't sure if it was ever gonna happen again—which I don't blame them for thinking. People who I had never seen before came up on the day and did their eliminations, and ended up with absolute crazy stuff that got them into the top eight.

I organized this event and I also hosted it, so throughout the entire event, I was seeing everyone's insane reactions out on the stage, or the front of the crowd. And it was phenomenal.  I also battled in the solo category, in front of a high profile set of judges.  Amaran, the 2015 Irish Beatbox Champion, DLow and Frosty. I have to say that I wasn't expecting to do too well. 

I won against a very heavy hitter, Meek, who had a lot of respect for and is one of the best beatboxers in the country. It was a very, very close battle. That was probably the biggest highlight of my life because that was my first time ever winning a battle. 

And even after that, I ended up having a rematch of the first ever battle I was in! I beat the defending champion Tremor, and I managed to make it to the finals! I ended up losing to Osis - 2022 Online World Beatbox Champion, and now Irish Beatbox Champion!

But yeah, to go from not knowing if an event was happening, to putting everything in, to making it one of the best events I've ever been to, and even making it to battle and battle again and battle in the Finals was crazy. The loopsation showcases were crazy. The judges' showcases, need I say, crazy. I highly urge people to consider coming to the championship next year because it's gonna be good.

Check out the Irish beatbox Association on YouTube or Instagram, as we're about to start releasing the elimination and battle videos!

The event recaps will usually be much shorter than this, but try as I might, I couldn’t cut any of this story. Beatbox organizing is a thankless job, and it’s worth hearing from the organizers themselves from time to time. That sort of transparency is good.

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Upcoming Calendar: Events

• JPN CUP ALL STAR BEATBOX FESTIVAL. Yokohama, Japan. January 28
• Indonesian Beatbox Party: Tangerang, Indonesia. February 3-4.
• Beatcity Japan. Tokyo, Japan. February 25.
• Loop Mayhem. Kassel, Germany. February 25.
• Canadian Beatbox Championship. Toronto, Canada. March 11.
• Crossroads Beatbox Battle: Kansas City, USA. March 17-19.
• Florida Beatbox Festival: Agen, France. March 31 - April 1.
• Circlejam Beatbox Festival: Klagenfurt, Austria. June 9-10.
• Beatland in-person final: Bali, Indonesia. August 25.

Upcoming Calendar: Wild Cards

• Oceana Beatbox Championship: Open until January 25.
• Beatbox Battle Junior Championship Series: Open until January 31.
• GBB Solo and Loop 1st Round, U18: Open until February 4th.
• GBB Tag-Team, Producer Showcase: Open until February 11th.
• Loop Insider Showcase Battle: Open until February 28.
• Beatland: Open until March 31.

If I missed any upcoming events or Wild Cards, hit me up on Instagram, I’m @HateItOrLevitt or @SpeshFX.