Where the **** did dubstep come from anyway? With most musical genres, like rock and roll or soul, you got a steady stylistic evolution over time, with different genres being combined and developed until a completely new genre came out at the end. Dubstep just appeared one day out of nowhere, a bit like the way young schoolchildren seem to appear on meat hooks in my garage. This could of course be a blessing, if it was halfway decent. To have a new and exciting type of music appear out of nowhere would be a nice little diversion before the fall of man. Sadly, it’s simply another mark in the book that the gods keep marked “Justification”. A combination of loud squarks and bass drops mixed with electronic drum sounds and occasional trippy bits is all you’re getting. People might mention some kind of link to dub reggae, but when you look right into it is has as little to do with reggae and its assorted genres as Silvio Berlusconi has with Italian politics.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. I’m not looking at the wide variety of ways dubstep is used. There’s the ever-present dubstep remix of every single in the charts today, or the people who make dubstep that isn’t based on anything at all-they’re just in it for the funny noises. Also to be noted are those of a Skrillexian nature who produce “standard” dubstep with the occasional bleep or bar of melody from an Atari game they probably never actually played. This makes hordes of teenyboppers (the author is aware he is around 40 years out of date with this expression) in Pac-Man t-shirts come with excitement and call the producer a ‘legend’ or ‘boss’ and play his music religiously while slowly rotting from the inside. To be honest, it’s the remixes that are the worst. They have a similar premise to Skrillexian dubstep in that the main appeal of the music lies in a small section from a known piece, played with a number of effects until the inevitable bass drop, after which it becomes a mixture of beats and noises that some call ‘heavy beats, raw and real’ and I call ‘utter ****, indicative of a lack of imagination and accompanied with the grappling sounds of somebody trying to get a firm hold on the bandwagon’. It does have some dancability, if you’re that way inclined, but only jumping-up-and-down-holding-the-index-finger-of-each-hand-in-the-air dancing, which is only really likely to sink you into anonymity; another part of the machine, or get you slapped. By me. In the f****ng face. With a metal gauntlet stuffed with bricks. That’s the kind of drop I’m looking for.
Wub wub bloody wub.
