Karim Manning teaches beatboxing and digital music classes at various schools and venues around Sarasota. He is currently offering a weekly class that runs four sessions through mid-March at the Sarasota Art Museum.
He spoke with WUSF's Kerry Sheridan about the art of beatboxing and why it's catching on with a younger crowd.
Tell me about why teaching beatboxing is important to you?
I think it's important to give context to the music that we listen to and love every day, which is why I talked (in class) a little bit about the history of hip-hop and the influence that it has over our current culture. But also, my goal is to inspire young people to find their own spark of creativity within themselves because I think we grow up in a culture where we're taught that being creative is unattainable, meaning like you have to be a celebrity or have some kind of special attributes to have skill, especially when it comes to music. So just being able to inspire young people to try it is important.
And they can do this without even knowing an instrument?
Exactly. And that's the magic of hip-hop, right? Kids who had no access to instruments, no access to music schools, no access to really any resources, they found a way to make music that is pretty much the most popular music style today. The most influential music style in our contemporary time would be hip-hop.
Tell me about your mentors, or your teachers.
Wow, I've had a lot of them along the way. The main mentors that I've had have been people who have pushed me to believe in myself. Those are the most important mentors, the ones who have reminded me of my value during those times when I felt like I didn't have any. People who inspired me to try.
When you come from the inner city, or you have less resources economically, you believe in the lack, right? And so that can become a part of what makes your personality and the foot you put forward into the world.
My most recent mentor has taught me to just remember that there's a purpose. No matter what's happening and how hard things are going, there's a reason for you to get through it. That's what you came here to do.
What do you hope that the kids will get out of this?
My vision is to create a culture of rappers, beatmakers, beatboxers and just a whole generation of kids in Sarasota that are doing this art form and doing it at a high, excellent level that is going to potentially get national attention. Like, whoa. Why are all these amazing hip-hop kids coming out of Sarasota? That's my intention.
I want to make it such a cultivating place for this type of art form because our kids are so hungry for it, and they really resonate with it, and they're attracted to it, but there isn't anyone or any entity or any place where they can learn rapping, where they can learn beatboxing, when they can learn how to produce beats in an unconventional way.
Not music composition from an orchestral or musical notation sense, but how do I just get a drum machine and take samples from records or from the internet and make a song with that? I think that's one of the most beautiful things about hip-hop, is that it's accessible. You don't have to come from a music background or go to a music school and have the formal training to learn how to do it.
That’s the other reason why I do it. If I had somebody like me who could teach me the basics of this when I was trying to learn it at like, 14. I don't even know where I would be. I probably would be way in a way different place, you know, performing all the time and doing it in a different capacity.
I would love to be able to facilitate that for another person, even just one person, if I could get them to be inspired enough to start to make this their practice and learn how to master it in 10 years. You know, a 12-year-old can master it in 10 years, and by the time they're 22 years old, they're a master rapper or beatboxer or beatmaker or whatever it is that they do. So that's what I look forward to.
How long have you been teaching?
The first real teaching work I did was working with developmentally disabled adults and children back in 2008. I did that for around three or four years, but in education per se, I started teaching here locally at Booker Middle School in 2017. I started doing an after-school program. And then I started doing in 2018 a digital music program in the class. So I was working with computers. The students would come in and use a computer and hardware that plugged into the computer, and they would make beats on it.
And so in conjunction with that class, I would teach them about Black history and also how to rap. They’d learn a lot of real history that they don't normally teach in school. But because I was, like, an adjunct professor, I was kind of, ‘Oh, you guys don't know who the Black Panthers are?’ They're like, ‘No.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, you need to know who the Black Panthers are.’ And just kind of sneak that stuff in because all of that's relevant.
Artists like Public Enemy making a song like "Fight The Power," that's the real purpose of that music. To be a voice for the voiceless, and a way to speak on the oppression that was being experienced by these young kids who had no resources.
