Chicago Beatdown: Rapping with Chicago beatboxer/actor Yuri Lane

You think human beatbox, you think hip-hop, rapid fire drum beats, record scratches, and lots of spitting. You don’t think story. You don’t think theater. And you certainly don’t think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Yuri Lane’s beatbox is a whole different sound, in that he also uses the music he makes with his mouth to tell stories.

The 38-year-old San Fran native moved to Chicago in 2003. In those six years, he’s become a YouTube sensation, with his vid “Harmonica + Beatbox: Final Cut” garnering north of 5 million views. He’s released an album, “Human Beatbox,” available on iTunes. And there’s his ongoing theater work, including “From Tel Aviv to Ramallah, A Beatbox Journey,” a play that explores the Israel-Palestine divide through beatbox, enhanced by a multimedia presentation that ebbs and flows with the beat. The play, first developed in 2003, will be performed this Saturday as a part of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Lane rapped with Chicago Beat about his love of beatbox, how his talent transcends a party trick and how Chicago’s influenced his sound.

Chicago Beat: So how did you fall in love with beatbox, and how did you go about developing that kind of talent?

Yuri Lane: Growing up in San Francisco leant itself to listening to lots of different types of music and [exposure] to different cultures and hearing the sounds of hip hop emanating from boomboxes at the schoolyard during lunch time. … I would be listening to my local radio station KPOO, and they would just play all the hip-hop songs of that time. We’re talking about Run-D.M.C., Afrika Bambaataa, Doug E. Fresh and The Fat Boys. … And I’ve always had a love for the rhythm of hip-hop. My dad was a big jazz buff, and congas and drums were always around the house. My mom’s a violinist, so I was definitely surrounded by music. I did not have the knack for musical theory like my younger sister, but I have the rhythm. So I started beatboxing when I was around 12 years old, and now I’ve been supporting myself through my beatbox performance since 2000. Of course, the life of an artist, you must do other things, so I’ve been teaching throughout those years, teaching beatbox theater and improvisation and teaching beatbox as a musical art form and also as a way to tell a story in an amusing and theatrical art form.

Doug E. Fresh said famously in a movie ‘Breath Control: The History of Human Beat Box,’ ‘You know, beatbox is like jazz in that you learn the tune, you remember the tune, and you yourself reinterpret the tune.’ And beatbox is really about the heartbeat, the rhythm inside you. And I started taking acting classes and started doing theater when I was really young, so I would learn how to use your voice as an instrument. And I just wouldn’t think about it at the time, but it really helped with the beatbox, because beatbox is all about using your voice as an instrument, using your lips for the drums, and your tongue and your cheek and your throat for the different sounds like making snare drums and vocal scratches and trumpet sounds. And you know beatbox is really a sort of self-taught type of art form. Now, there are people teaching beatbox, there are instructional videos on YouTube, and there are ways in which you can really learn how to beatbox. But I tell people who want to get into beatboxing to take an acting class and listen to your surroundings and listen to the music that inspires you and try to mimic it. It’s really about never losing your childlike sensibilities, because when you’re a little boy you’re always making sounds of cars and G.I. Joe figures, and sometimes parents and teachers say, ‘Don’t make those silly noises.’ Well, I never stopped and didn’t listen to those people. And so really keeping that child inside of you really helps with the beatbox.

I see it like being an opera singer. Opera singers train their voices doing scales all the time, really trying to use their diaphragm, and beatbox is like that. But I tell other beatboxers, ‘The more you think about beatbox, the more difficult it becomes.’ Because really it is just a rhythmic language in which I speak.

CB: Beatboxing’s mostly associated with music, but you use it to tell stories in your plays. How did that transition come about?

YL: I had this epiphany around ’99, 2000. I was doing this show with some friends in the Bay Area. It was funny, there were too many beatboxers and MCs in one room. And I had a scene I was getting ready for, and I just started beatboxing and moving and dancing and this light bulb went off. This is what I was going to do. Use the beatbox to tell a story as a way to get into a character. Some actors, they get into a character through their body or through their voice, but I’m like every character, every environment that I inhabit has a soundtrack, has a rhythm, has a different beat. And that’s how ‘Soundtrack City,’ my first show, started. And since then I’ve just kept on developing this genre of performance. …

Beatbox is something that when it is heard it is essentially music, but when you see it and hear it at the same time, its magic. You don’t know where the sounds are coming from. … A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s like a party trick.’ Or, ‘He has this funny little talent that he can do.’ So [using beatbox in theater] was to try and get over that, to let people know it’s a form of performance that goes back as far as the oral tradition, it goes back to the Greek plays when people were doing the first sounds in poetry. … When I first start performing I start out with a nice beatbox introduction. And then I start to show the audience that each character has their own soundtrack. Hopefully folks will marvel at the beatbox, and then hopefully that will just fade away, and they’ll forget about that and get into the characters through their sounds, through their different rhythms and songs. It’s important you bring in the familiar, certain songs that people know. And then they’ll go, ‘Oh, that song fits that person.’ It doesn’t always have to be a familiar song, but that’s a good way to grab the audience. Then all of a sudden, hopefully they leave the show and they’re humming the songs or trying to beatbox the tunes from the song. It’s definitely a new art form of using beatbox as a way to bring out the motion of a scene and specifically of the characters. There are characters speaking to each other through their soundtracks instead of dialogue.

CB: Tell me about ‘From Tel Aviv to Ramallah.’ It’s safe to say many people wouldn’t associate beatbox with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So tell me how it came about.

YL: It’s interesting in that I think beatbox reaches people of all ages. And specifically ‘From Tel Aviv to Ramallah’ has been a way to reach a real wide range of ages. People who are a lot older, say in their 70s, and they grew up towards the end of vaudeville. And I kind of feel like I have some of the roots in vaudeville. … And I reached the inner city audience, and was able to get people to think about and find out about Ramallah and Tel Aviv [when they didn’t] know anything about that place. I basically started it out as a 15-minute show going to open mics and then developed the show. My wife, girlfriend at the time, she was like, ‘All right, you’ve been talking about this one-man show, where is this one-man show?’ …

My wife, Professor Rachel Havrelock at UIC, she’s the writer and director of the show, and she’s a Biblical scholar and fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. We traveled to the Middle East and took this journey, and Rachel had been thinking about writing a book about her experiences living in Palestine and in Israel, and realized that a lot of people like to write a book about their journey to the Middle East. So instead we thought, ‘Let’s do it in a play form, as a beatbox style play.’ And so the show is about daily life in Ramallah and Tel Aviv. It centers around two guys in their 20s. One is an Israeli delivery guy during the day and a DJ at night. The other is a Palestinian Internet café owner. And I go back and forth between both their lives and become their family members and the neighborhood in which they live in, and go back and forth showing what they go through and how the separation wall divides them. In another life, maybe they would be collaborating. The show begins at a checkpoint and ends at a checkpoint. It’s really about the humanity at both these places. And hip-hop is alive and well in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, and these two places are similar, and these two people have a lot of similarities [such as] their families and what’s important to them. [The characters] don’t try to avoid the situation and conflict that’s happening, but they’re trying to live their lives and fulfill their dreams, and the conflict gets in the way of that.

It’s funny. A lot of people think when they hear ‘From Tel Aviv to Ramallah,’ they think I’m going to go up there and make some political speech. So that’s always kind of a challenge already with just the title of the show, people are afraid. But what’s really amazing is the show has been sponsored by the Muslim Student Association and co-sponsored by Hillel, which never happens, or if it does it takes something like the universal language and art form of hip hop. And so dialogue groups have come out from seeing the show. I’ve done a show in Israel, in Jerusalem. And I think the greatest comment I’ve received was from an Israeli. He said, ‘A lot of people who don’t live here and are outside of the situation and try to do a play or a movie, they don’t get it. You get it. You’re like a sponge. You take in all the information and the sounds and the emotions.’ That’s great to hear from Israelis, and Palestinians, where it’s difficult to impress them. (Laughs).

CB: You’ve lived in Chicago since 2003. How has the city influenced your beatboxing?

YL: I’m known around the Internet for combining the beatbox and harmonica together. I’m the beatbox harmonica dude. And I’ll take that, that’s great. So when I moved here, this was the home of the blues music. And having an appreciation for blues music, and me being a beatboxer first and a harmonica player second, I just started to listen to the blues music. Blues and hip-hop are very closely related; there wouldn’t be hip-hop if there weren’t blues. Blues is rock, blues is soul, and blues is hip-hop.

Also I did ‘Soundtrack City Chicago,’ where I really took in all the neighborhoods in Chicago. And ‘Soundtrack City Chicago’ to me was the fully realized play that ‘Soundtrack City’ lacked when I did it in Chicago. [‘Soundtrack City Chicago’] was more about the neighborhoods changing and people being moved out of certain neighborhoods and how each neighborhood is so different. Chicago is a place of neighborhoods – Ukrainian Village, the South Side, the West Side – and how it is in a lot of ways people are segregated from each other, and there are stereotypes that sometimes are true. But in every neighborhood there is something rich and amazing, and community is extremely important in Chicago.

CB: What’s next?

YL: I have a show that I’m working on; it’s called ‘Me Tube’ [set to premiere in Chicago next May]. It’s about my Internet self, and how everyone has this person that they are. Everyone has a Facebook page and a Twitter page and a YouTube page. And the conversation is, is that you? Is that really who you are? I basically have over 11 million hits on YouTube, and I have thousands of comments on my videos, and they essentially have become part of the script. Each commentator is a character, and I get these video responses from people. And I have three characters in the show that are video responders – someone who was inspired by the beatbox in Monaco, someone who called me out and wants to battle me, and someone who lives in Senegal and wants to do a song. So it’s a show about YouTube and the Internet so essentially I become YouTube, and it’s the story about becoming ‘the number one video on YouTube,’ and what does that mean, and what does it mean to get a million hits, and how can you make a living as an artist and still be true to yourself. I feel like it’ll be the type of show that changes and evolves, because YouTube is always changing, and there will always be a different number one video. It’s gone from cats playing piano or spiders on drug, now you’ve made this jump from funny things on videos to politics to talking about the election and people putting stuff up from Iran. So it’s a political platform for real artists and real performers. [‘Me Tube’ is] funny, and it’s also about the ego as an artist. Why do we put videos up there? Because we want to be loved. And who are the critics? My biggest fan base are 13-year-old kids from France. I can find out who’s watching my videos. … You can reach people all over the world and physically go to some places [for performances] when your video becomes popular. … YouTube has been my promoter and my agent. It got me a whole lot work than my manager and my agency, I can tell you that.  

“Yuri Lane: From Tel Aviv to Ramallah, A Beatbox Journey” will be performed at 7 p.m. Saturday at Francis W. Parker School, 2233 N. Clark St. Tickets are $20 at the door, free for students and teachers with valid IDs.