Rupture pulls together a few interesting strands on the current state of dubstep.
Scene development has to be one of the most frustrating things in existence. The trail from bright and inclusive to hardened shell stifling internal life seems to have become a key feature of music culture in the time I’ve been following it; especially the steps from house to jungle/drum’n'bass to big beat (for anyone who can remember how exciting and all-encompassing that scene was initially) to 2step to dubstep/grime. It’s almost as though the scenes needs the explosion/implosion dynamic to amass the energies required to catalyse these musical leaps. Or is it just a generational thing, from bright and excited to jaded and functional?
Rupture quotes a Kevin Martin/The Bug interview:
Because for me the beauty of dubstep were the producers that I met in the beginning, the fact that they were influenced by a lot of different music; Kode 9, Mala, influenced by jungle, influenced by dub, influenced by classical music, soundtrack music. That’s brilliant, I could hear that on the tracks but now i think that there are new producers that are coming into dubstep and they only listen to dubstep and for me that’s when jungle became drum n bass, that was the problem then.
Talking about the differences between dubstep and grime, in terms of how they’ll be remembered, and how they’re setting themselves up to be remembered, Rupture says:
The subject of a dubstep documentary – any documentary – is ‘dubstep’ itself (the integral objecthood of the docu’s subject); not the content of the scene but only its most obvious, exterior shell, the part of it which has hardened into visibility and no longer moves (maybe the dead part). Once people outside your scene recognize your scene as such, (talking in money terms here) they recognize you as a potential market, something they can invest in or advertise to: you exist.
The hardened shell of the scene? Has it come to this?
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Big beat sucked right from the start.
And that is my entirely useless contribution to this discussion. kthxbye
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I think people get bogged down in things like ‘the scene’ too often, and perhaps over analyse as well. Sure there is a lot of crap dubstep coming out, but there are also quite a lot of good tunes being produced which do demonstrate the kind of synthesis and influence you’re talking about. But I don’t think that dubstep produced by people who only listen to dubstep can automatically be labeled as shit either, although obviously the range of sounds you’re going to get will be more limited. Also, I think dubstep and grime shouldn’t be separated as such and certainly their similarities are far more persuasive than their difference. It’s far better, at least in my mind, to view them as part of a whole which should be enjoyed as such.
If you listen to as much as you can but only play selectively, the more interesting and better produced tracks, and yourself listen to and play a range of genres and sounds then I don’t think you need to pay attention to a scene as such.
ps. see you at Ug tonight.
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probably should have read that article first, then my response may have been more relevant.
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hey look, big beat rocked. It reawakened my love of electronic music because it was so stupid, and yes it got lame after a while but the initial esotericism was well wicked, and some of those tracks still stand up now.
But with dubstep yet, there hasn’t quite been the same exposure, there’s no fatboy slim of dubstep and there’s no skint about to sell out to sony. It’s a different word to a certain extent.
I think the fact that a lot of the dubstep crowd (in sydney at least) has come from the drum and bass scene, where people crying out for new music but restrained by the collective consciousness of narrow musical taste that seems to envelope many dnb heads have found a form that references their beloved sound enough to be considered worthy.
But there are plenty of dnb heads who are still super militant and reject dubstep.
And then amongst people I know who like dubstep, there are often preferences for one particular style or the other – for instance, I know a few techno people who can’t abide anything with more than a skerrick of JA influence and whose preference is for the more idm-edged stuff.
I don’t really own much dubstep on vinyl, as a lot of it I don’t listen to and a lot of it I don’t really like, to be honest. And I worry a little about the growing popularity of the genre rigidising the aesthetic form so much.
But then there’s still shitloads of great, weird, new music being made at dnb tempos; this scene stagnation thing is only happening at the party level, and the HMV/Beatport level. There’s always great music. Just download a kid kameleon mix, bribe your neighbours with a case or two, invite your mates round and mash down babylon in your own house.
And as long as skream is digging disco jams it can’t be all doom and gloom
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well said!
i’m not feeling gloomy about it, though i have to say it’s the stuff on the periphery – weird instrumental grime and post-dancehall riddims that are making me freak out at the moment (the vocal stuff is hot too, but it obviously flips the emphasis away from the beats).
the scene thing is really underrated in understanding how great music develops. i think the incremental shifts in thinking that happen as a group of producers rub up against each other, subtly reinterpreting sonic elements, have been especially vital in the progression of most forms of dance music. auteurs still push things forward on the edge, but sometimes i think they’re more like experimenters than musicians, with the reevaluaters (who come later) actually making the music.
scenes stifling creativity – the dnb scene is a perfect case, of course – is nothing new either. i guess it’s a balancing act!
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Belated response to this: I guess 90% of all music comes out of scenes. People sharing equipment, expertise, sounds, support, money, love, whatever. Scenes build infrastructure – physical, emotional, sonic. And initially that infrastructure is really helpful and then it becomes restrictive. And the scene calcifies.
Like Some Freak, I’m going to defend Big Beat. It was so fun and so inclusive. It was dance music for people who didn’t really get dance music – which made it wonderful. And for a while, it kept that sense of the ridiculous, of pure pre-pubescent pleasure.
Dubstep is far less inclusive. In some senses, it’s the least approachable version of ‘ardcore’s grandchildren. Grime is more nakedly aggressive / standoffish but it has voices & personalities. Dubstep feels like it’s still a music for a minority. It has a sheen of exclusivity, of seriousness to it. It seems a little light on “juice”…
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