So what's the deal with dubstep?

[ph00tbag]

Dubstep, in its original formulation was a very, very, very niche style played almost exclusively in London clubs. The point wasn't actually to be danceable, near as I can tell. It was chillout music, first and foremost, the point being to capture the sense of dub music, but overlaid with the sensibilities (or lack thereof?) of garage and two-step. This music isn't interesting. It's not really meant to be, otherwise it would get in the way of your own meditations, since it was more seeking to facilitate a meditative state. Then, something found dubstep.

I'd agree with the Idea Channel's assessment of brostep (because it's far enough removed from the original sound, and more importantly the intent, of classic dubstep, to warrant being called its own genre). In particular, it encapsulates two concepts that are relatively new to music. The first is the whole notion that anything can be music, and the exploration of that requires the breakdown and reanalysis of all sound. Essentially, the notion that any quality of a sound can be modified in an organised way. Granted, brostep is certainly not the first genre to do this--it's been in styles like glitch and IDM for more than a decade.

The more interesting thing that brostep does is that it makes recombinant art a focus. A lot of music up to this point has used sampling to create aids to music, but the sampling has never really been the music. Brostep is a pretty heavy handed metaphor for all of the aural crap that we're bombarded with in our daily lives. It's like switching through the radio trying to find something to drown out the construction crew across the street while your senile grandmother yells about how she can't find her dentures (they're in her mouth). People who complain about it being noise are kind of ignoring the fact that that's the point; it's channeling all the noise and aggression of the modern human aural experience. It's fitting that the artists making this music plopped their ideas down on a genre that really just kinda wanted to be left alone to chill out and listen to sub bass all day.

I personally don't care for brostep all that much. I'm a rather brooding, meditative individual, and the attention deficit nature of brostep isn't the kind of thing that I can listen to for long periods of time. The idea is fun to think about, though.

[ChromaticChaosPony]

People who complain about it being noise are kind of ignoring the fact that that's the point; it's channeling all the noise and aggression of the modern human aural experience.

Death metal and grindcore bands (like Morbid Angel or Carcass) did this way earlier. *puts on hipster glasses*

Just kidding. You could hypotheically argue that any avante garde styles did this first.

In an effort not to derail this thread, have some recent-ish dubstep history:
In 2009, Excision and Datsik both got their Swagga back.

[Subrick]

I hear that dubstep was originally invented when someone's computer decided to lock up during boot up, so the owner of said computer decided to beat the hell out of it with a wooden baseball bat. He liked the sound of it, so he decided to beat the crap out of a whole bunch of computers to get that sound. But he felt like it needed something more, so he ate many dozens of dollars worth of Taco Bell and sampled the sounds of the dumps he took from them.

And that's how dubstep was made.

[ph00tbag]

Death metal and grindcore bands (like Morbid Angel or Carcass) did this way earlier. *puts on hipster glasses*

Just kidding. You could hypotheically argue that any avante garde styles did this first.

Well, I'd argue that death metal and grindcore weren't as concerned with regurgitating culture as they were with rejecting it altogether.

Although, many avant garde genres in the past have indeed contained commentaries on the musicality of the sounds around us. But it's only in the past fifty years or so that those sounds have become as grating, aggressive and nigh incomprehensible has they are today, namely in the context of the consumer culture, which I'd argue brostep is a direct result of. The makers of musique concrete didn't really have a context to comment on just how ubiquitous noise is in the modern world.