“Trust me, if you were there, you would have enjoyed it” pleaded James, defending his pregame music selection as we sat in his apartment before a night of Allentown hijinks. The music was Zed’s Dead, and James Wild, buffaBLOG’s own Drum Machine Reporter, was sticking up for the group upon seeing my face contort in a disapproving fashion.  I’ve never been one for kneejerk reactions, so I couldn’t help but wonder why my body quivers with rejection every time I hear the familiar womps and breaks of the dubstep sound. I’ve always appreciated James’ taste in electronic music, so I felt I owed the genre some further analysis

There are differing opinions on where dubstep originated, but the first club devoted entirely to dubstep was Forward>>, founded in 2001 in London’s Soho by Ammunition Promotions.  The genre wasn’t really given a concrete name until around 2002, when Horsepower Productions was featured on the cover of XLR8R magazine. A radio show on London’s pirate radio station called Rinse FM (where have I heard that word recently?) was hosted by Kode9 and featured such artists as Youngsta, Zed Bias, Slimzee, and eventually such heavy hitters as Benga and Skream.  Early dubstep beats sounded much more like fractured R & B, with rougher drums and more melodic samples than what you hear today. 

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the genre, so that’s where we’ll end the history lesson.  The point of this article is not to educate, it’s to analyze. Where did dubstep go wrong? Why did a genre that flourished creatively and commercially overseas get met with such a divided reaction in the states? America has always been really fickle with its opinion on electronic music.  Remember the big beat boom in the late 90’s? (For you younger readers, let me rephrase that: There was a big beat boom in the late 90’s.) Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers were paraded about by the American mainstream media as “the next big thing”.  Then, something interesting happened, Americans decided they hated electronic music, and instead found comfort in the likes of The Backstreet Boys and Nickelback (a dark, dark time). Electronic music retreated back overseas with its tail between its legs and America deemed itself too masculine to dance to four on the floor beats.  

Enter dubstep, with its roots in hip hop breaks and dub samples, there was certainly nothing uncool about it.  Feeling weary of another “fruity European craze” though, the genre remained firmly out of the mainstream.  Since hipsters crave nothing more than shit you haven’t heard of, it naturally gained momentum over the last decade. That is, until Britney Spears got her slimy, Disney hands on it for her single “Freakshow”, from the 2007 album Blackout, a word Britney is all too familiar with (zing!).  Suddenly, the mainstream had taken almost a decade’s development of a genre and whittled it down to a collection of noisy womps and tired dance floor buildups.  Now America could have its cake and eat it too, reviving the I’m-glad-it’s-dead candy rave culture for a new crop of artists armed with a new sound.  Modern dubstep in America plays like a big beat do-over, giving young kids a chance to enjoy lasers and fog at half the tempo. The basic machinations are the same: big swells followed by a hard bass drop, rinse and repeat. The only difference was the underlying tempo. Twisted Records artist Ott famously said in an interview “you can’t dance to trance music without looking like you’ve shit your pants” (Okay, that wasn’t a famous interview, but it should be because it’s hilarious).  The point is Americans now got to enjoy all of the fruits of rave culture without having to put up with that damn four on the floor beat. 

So why then, do people like myself react with such negativity? Perhaps there’s a certain hypocrisy to my cynicism, as I too was once swimming in a culture of dimly lit warehouses and questionable pills with reckless abandon.  Who am I to rob the next generation of that experience?  Is it the music itself that I hate?  I can easily acknowledge that the song James played for me required an impressive amount of technical prowess, as does much of the production in modern dubstep.  Perhaps it’s the crowds themselves that I’m reacting to, a colorful rainbow of blissful ignorance and misinformed expertise, qualities that I no doubt possessed at that age. Have I become a curmudgeonly old coot, wandering through a sea of glow sticks with a figurative shotgun, hollering at candy ravers to get off my lawn?

If this is the case, the situation reminds me of the fall of disco in the late ‘70’s.  People back then weren’t reacting so much to the music, but the culture around it.  Out of context, I think a lot of the music produced back then is pretty rad, but I don’t have to suffer the scene that surrounded it, so my opinion can be more objective.  That’s the inherent problem with the Pitchfork generation, which tends to focus on context over content.  More attention is paid to why something is made and how it relates to the scene around it than allowing the music to stand on its own.  That’s actually the problem with reviewing music in general, as it is a living thing that grows and develops based on the listener’s tastes and emotions.  I’m curious what dubstep will seem like in 30 years, when the scene has gone away and all that remains is the music. I’ll probably be much kinder to it, only because I’ll be quietly laughing at the fans that denounce whatever genre is currently popular and take to writing articles like this one.