One of the country’s best beatboxers, Alejandro Eulacio, lives in DC, and he’s launching what he describes as the city’s first beatboxing competition. The event, called the Capital Beatbox Battle, will be held October 23 at Bloomers in Columbia Heights.
You might not think of beatboxing as fodder for a competition, but the musical form—which involves making beats with just your mouth and a mic—has earned popularity as a competitive sport in the same way breakdancing has.
Eulacio, who was born in Venezuela and grew up in DC, says he has achieved all he wants as a battler, finishing in the top 16 in the USA last year with a slow-paced hip-hop style driven by tongue rolls and clicks. Now he has turned his focus to organizing. He’s hoping that by hosting this competition, he can introduce the national community to the beatboxers he’s been cultivating here.
Beatboxing has been around for decades, with early practitioners such as Rahzel and Doug E. Fresh building hits around the technique. American servicemen brought the form to Europe during the late Cold War and inspired an international community that has kept it going as interest in the US waned. “It’s an extremely accessible art form,” says Eulacio, “that was born out of people who didn’t have the resources to buy equipment like drum machines, who started creating art with the tools they had—just their body.”
Eulacio got into beatboxing when he was a teen in Fairfax, then continued to develop his skills in college. In 2022, he went to Madrid to get a master’s degree in geographic information technologies, and it was there that he fell in with the competitive beatboxing scene. He’s been battling ever since.
After moving back to DC to work at an NGO, he continued to compete, traveling to battles like the Crossroads Beatbox Battle in Kansas City and the USA Championships in New York. But he was always drawn to the community-building aspect, and he wanted to try to bring beatboxing competitions to his home city. Last year he co-launched a group called Beatbox DMV, which is putting on the Capital Beatbox Battle. Contestants will showcase their skills in front of a panel of expert judges (anyone can participate in the open elimination round). The top-ranked performers are then slated into a battle bracket, with the judges deciding each winner based on two 90-second rounds.
Eulacio is also promoting the event as an anti-fascism protest, tapping into hip-hop’s tradition of political activism. That aspect makes it a distinctly DC event, he says, since the modern beatbox battle scene “is very centered around competition and the nerdy elements of beatboxing, techniques and [new sounds]. There hasn’t really been much political activism.”
