This story is both touching and undeniably dope. A short documentary was just released by Swissbeatbox, the leading YouTube channel for the international beatboxing community. It focuses on Li Erkun, a 15-year-old kid in the southwestern city of Chengdu (a leading city in China’s hip hop scene), and how he came to discover himself as a beatboxer. Beatboxing, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is a way of using your mouth to mimic the sounds of a drum beat. The lesser-seen component of hip hop culture has found itself as the punchline of jokes in the past – but the documentary gives the viewer a peek behind the curtain at the friendships and stories that compose the worldwide community behind the art. Li, bound to a wheelchair, explains how beatboxing breathed new energy into his life. He started studying on his own before finding his teacher, a foreigner named Dmitrii. The video paints a startlingly sincere portrait of how something obscure like beatboxing can go on to define a person, and the connections they make with the world around them. Check it out for yourself and see what we mean.
