Dharni - Breaking Down The Beat

Dharni – two-time world beatboxing champion – opens up (literally) on how to spit like a lean, mean, world championship-winning machine.

- Bryan Goh

“I was 14 when I first saw Michael Winslow on television, and I remembered thinking how cool it was that he could make sounds with his mouth. So, I did the same, but I also imitated the sounds and beats I heard on the radio and the Internet. I was also part of a forum called Human Beatbox, where I shared audio recordings with the community, and that’s how I continued improving my skills.”

To get a clearer picture of what Dharni – the first person in history to win the Grand Beatbox Battle Championship twice in a row – is like in person, Men’s Folio would like one to procure a copy of The New International Webster’s Pocket Thesaurus. Once done, flip to page 286 to look for the word “swagger”, which is exactly how Dharni exits the gilded doors of The Four Seasons Kuala Lumpur to greet this writer.

While one might think the Warsaw-based Singaporean beatboxer is the paragon of cool and confidence, it does not take much for him to warm up. All it takes is a keen, “Sure, bro!” when he offers to show a YouTube tutorial by him on how to beatbox: “Step one: you got to sound like a turtle making love. So it’ll sound like this, ‘[breathy voice] Heh, heh, heeeeeeeeh!’”

“That’s pretty funny, right? I have a formula on YouTube where I give tutorials with layers of humour and wittiness. One of my videos got 400,000 views over four days. They’re all creatively conceptualised by me on the spot. Give it a shot, man!”

When this writer presses him on why he does not do the classic YouTube content creator signoff – “for more of such content, like and subscribe” – Dharni frowns for the first time and waves it off impatiently. “I don’t do the like and subscribe thing; I find it cheap! If people like my work, they’ll like and subscribe.”