Posts tagged “education”

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We started the BAC Beatbox Academy with some outreach workshops in schools and youth clubs. One teacher responded to our follow up call with: “No, no you don’t want to bother contacting him, he’s a nightmare. He is disruptive, noisy, sometimes violent and cannot concentrate on anything for more than 5 seconds. He’s been excluded from this school.”

Eventually we got hold of him through his mates. He is one of the most dedicated, focused and fast-learning students I have ever worked with.

During the Academy’s term, a group of kids come together for two hours every Saturday. Some of them are from difficult backgrounds, with little going on at school that they care about. When they are with us, they work together to develop their own music, experiment with their voices and improvise in a group situation. At the end of the course, each young beatboxer records a video for a DVD which they can take home and show to their mates, and the course ends with a show for family and friends.

The next big step is to teach some of the older kids how to be leaders themselves, so that the movement can keep on developing.

Bringing all these young beatboxers onstage at the QEH earlier this month has proved to me that beatboxing is a way of bringing people together. In the past year I’ve seen grannies beatboxing side by side with “hoodies”, and I’ve seen parents amazed by the talent they never realised their child had.

Group beatbox teaching is a unique technique for encouraging people to connect with others in a positive, musical way, without looking un-cool.

I think these ideas have the potential to change the attitudes of certain young people. Attitudes which are currently leading to a downward spiral of post-code wars, drugs, knife crime and in some areas gun crime. It gives young people an excuse to take an interest in learning, applying themselves, and taking some positive steps out of the vicious chain of events in their lives.

The recent outreach work we’ve been doing has led me to bring up some issues I have with the way musical education is approached in this country. I believe that music needs to be inspiration-led. Without inspiration, there is no music. My own drive to make music was born directly out of my obsession with my heroes, starting out with watching Michael Jackson on TV, when I was 6, and going on from there. All I wanted to do was learn how to be like that.

I don’t believe that turning up at a school and handing a kid an oboe or a violin and a sheet of music and saying ‘learn this’ is ever going to be appealing, let alone inspiring. Music teachers do a great job but are constantly up against the constraints of time, class sizes, a narrow curriculum, and the fact that a lot of teachers I’ve met feel that they are just ‘babysitting’ the class and stopping them from throwing chairs at each other for 30 minutes, rather than imparting actual knowledge.

Even singing, which I see the government announcing millions of funding for, is hard to present in a way that is cool to young people.

Me teaching

But beatboxing is different. You can turn up anywhere: at school, at a youth club, or on the street, with a sound system and a beatboxer, and you can amaze people. They are immediately into it. They are intrigued and want to know more. And the thing is: anyone can do it, anywhere. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, what age, sex or colour you are, or what music you like. Everybody has a voice, and because the basics of beatboxing consist of simple phonetic sounds which we all use in day to day speech, it doesn’t take long to get started.

To be continued… (see rest of post here)