Documentary film at Webster Feb. 2 & 3
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
In Joey Garfield’s energetic and entertaining documentary Breath Control, which screens Feb. 2 and 3 at Webster University, Doug E. Fresh says, “I have not visited a place yet where people did not get into beatbox.” This checks out for his recent visits to St. Louis, when he broke some beats as host of the St. Louis American Foundation’s Salute to Excellence in Education. And folks got into it.
Throughout this 74-minute film, folks get into beatboxing, whenever it’s in the room or on the stage or streetcorner. Beatboxing is an infectious mix of the first human instrument, the voice, and what was probably the first instrument outside of the human body, the drum.
This is not to deny that beatboxing – making drum sounds, or any sound imaginable, with your mouth – is a peculiar thing to do. It is pretty weird. Ask the mother of contemporary beatboxer D.O.A. “He started making weird sounds,” his mama says of her son’s art. The Latino beatboxer Click got it even worse from his papi. “My dad said I sounded retarded,” Click says.
For folks whose affection for hip-hop has some age to it, there is a freshness and innocence to beatboxing. Maybe because it’s such a kid thing to do, to sit or walk around, making music with nothing but your mouth. More than one beatboxer interviewed confesses that’s why he started doing it – because he didn’t have any money to buy an instrument, and God had already fixed him up with a mouth.
The documentary is dedicated to a poster boy for the kid-like, cuddly image of the beatboxer, the late Darren “Buff” Robinson of the Fat Boys, whose crazy Elton John eyeglasses only made his baby face look rounder and more adorable.
The movie recycles one of hip-hop’s old riddles of origin: Who came first, Doug E. or Buff? The manager of the Fat Boys says Doug E. was first but his boys blew up before he did, which confused the issue. Several beatboxers claim to have come up around the same time as both those guys and come up with the same sounds on their own. That’s believable. One of the last artists featured in the film is a white kid who beatboxes at the speed and light and says straight-up that he got started by imitating drums rolls from Smashing Pumpkins records.
Which is not to say you can’t trace beatboxing back to Africa, as Garfield does, half-heartedly. A segment on the talking drum would have been in order, since it’s an inverted ancestor of beatboxing. Buff used his mouth like a drum, but you can bet his grandaddy’s granddaddy’s granddaddy used a drum like a mouth, taking advantage of the tonal character of West African languages (a word can change meaning when pronounced at a different pitch) to make a drum talk.
Garfield may not have his folklore all worked out, but at least he had the good sense to sit down with Maria Daulne of Zap Mama, who was born in the Congo and raised in France and has the star power of Jimi Hendrix or Serena Williams. When she talks about the mouth music of her Congolese aunties, we really feel it. We get the point.
We also feel the old heads when they regret the decline in beatboxing, in this age of gangsta rap. But Breath Control is not a sad song about a lost art, thanks to The Roots and their incorporation of Scratch and Rahzel, who reminded a new generation that beatboxing is essential to hip-hop. Like all the other beatboxers, Scratch and Rahzel come across as calm, cool guys. Garfield hangs with them so much we start to feel like we’re on tour with The Roots, hanging in the slack back with the beatboxers. It’s not a bad view of the action.
This likable film has its flaws. The production values are uneven and often suck. It has the worst titles I have ever seen on a movie being offered to the public. It comes up against the challenge inherent to hip-hop (and most pop musical) documentaries – that many of the subjects being interviewed look a little too stoned to think sequentially and in depth. But, out of the haze of the blunts, some good interviews and intelligent observations emerge.
My favorite is Radioactive, the amiable brother who beatboxes for Spearhead. “It’s not my beat,” he says. “I didn’t create the beat. I was created by it.”
I will take this brother and that observation over the 400 million emcees that have been up in my face talking about their length and their stamina and their jumpshot and their hoes and their cheddar and their rims.
“I didn’t create the beat. I was created by it.”
Long live the beatbox!
Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box will screen February 2 & 3 at 7 p.m. in Moore Auditorium on the campus of Webster University, 470 E. Lockwood. Admission is $6; $5 for seniors, students from other schools and Webster alumni; and $4 for Webster University staff and faculty. Visit www.webster.edu/filmseries.html.