stevs

Who ruined dubstep?

Premise

I wasn’t paying attention to the beginning of dubstep, and I haven’t been paying attention recently, but I followed things pretty closely from about 2003-2009. In that time I saw the term “dubstep” transform from a fairly apt designator of a genre built around electronic recontextualization of dub music and culture to a warning label indicating that obnoxious squelching fart noises kick in at 55 seconds.

So, when people ask me whether I like dubstep, it is accompanied by the sound of a can of worms opening. Apart from the central conceit of the 140bpm half-time rhythm with the snare on the third beat, “dubstep” refers to at least two wildly-different things. And that’s the major problem I have with this development, in a nutshell: that the word doesn’t have a proper unambiguous meaning anymore. I don’t have an issue with the proliferation of modern dubstep, I just wish they would call it something else, so that if I type “dubstep” into Mixcloud I won’t herniate.

Right away you can see I’ll have a problem with pinpointing the one true ruiner of dubstep, because there isn’t a Secretary of Electronica Subgenres uniquely responsible for determining what is dubstep and what is garage and what is wobble. The failing belongs to the community as a whole for not differentiating when it was appropriate. Seldom is the argument made for a more baroque tree of subgenres, but they are handy things when you’re searching for new music within the bounds of a certain agreeable aesthetic.

Just because I’ve set up an unanswerable question doesn’t mean I won’t drag some strangers’ names through the mud attempting to answer it anyway, though. With that in mind I present the following brief history of what went wrong, when, and who was on the buttons at the time.

Premise II: Illustrated

If you don’t know what any of this is about, this is a dub song (looped for some reason):

Wackies Rhythm Force - Stay on Dub (1983)

Pretty great, yeah? Nice deep bass, spacious delay, brief snatches of vocals, dance-oriented syncopation.

Cf some classic dubstep:

Mala - Miracles (2008)

Like it or not, it’s impossible to miss the influence. “Dubstep” here seems a perfectly cromulent descriptor. It’s dub, with the “-step” part perhaps evoking some influence from techstep and the other drum and bass subgenres that sprung up when dnb faced its own problems with formulaic noise usurping its terminology.

Admittedly, this track is cherry-picked to show the lineage clearly, and there was a lot of classic dubstep that is more “step” than “dub”. If you’re unclear what I’m arguing “step” is supposed to evoke, here is a sample of some techstep:

Dom & Roland - Thunder (1998)

And for comparison here is some still-classic but more -step-oriented dubstep:

Distance - Tuning (2007)

It’s still no great stretch to draw connections to elements of the dub aesthetic in the rhythm section and in the choice of effects, but the comparison is readier to the pitch-black atmosphere of the Dom & Roland track. The drum sounds and the synth patches are quite similar. Not to mention the album covers.

Therefor I posit that we have a genre we can loosely define as encompassing a gradient between techstep and dub, with some tracks falling closer to either end of the spectrum according to the producers’ sensibilities. It’s ok to have a little elasticity in our genre designations so we don’t need a new one for each song and so we don’t have to do every song by-the-numbers to fit some exacting criteria of dubsteppitude. A problem arises though, at least to my mind, when you take songs like these examples from Distance and Mala and then say that this one is pretty much the same thing:

Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2010)

Now, regardless of what you think about that in terms of value judgements, you would almost have to agree that it doesn’t have much to do with either dub or step as we’ve delineated them thus far. The synths and that vocal are straight out of trance. Forgive me for not knowing much about trance, but here is a random song that I hope will suffice to show the influence:

Perhaps this type of music does have some claim to be something-step, because it does draw the kitchen-sink approach to basslines and even “oh my gawd!” from “clownstep”, a pejorative term given to what is objectively the worst form of drum and bass and maybe even of all human endeavor:

Nicky Blackmarket & Andy C - Dirty Lil Slut (20whogivesashit)

The remainder of this post will (a) show how dubstep got from there to here and (b) serve as your official written apology for having listened to any part of that Andy C track.

Suspect #1: Coki

Coki is part of Digital Mystikz along with Mala and Loefah. As far as classic-dubstep cred goes that is the platinum standard. He made some awesome tunes on his own too, tunes in keeping with his pedigree:

Coki - Officer (2005)

He also made this, arguably the first important foray into “wub” under the dubstep moniker:

Coki - Spongebob (2007)

It’s hard to overstate how popular this tune was in the scene. At the time, it was something really different. Dubstep was by and large sparse, dark, and somewhat restrained in its approach. Spongebob presented something wildly different, albeit with enough of the same halfstep trappings that it could fit into a mix without any undo contortions.

I can’t blame Coki, though, because it was so different at the time. Every annoying template was once a new idea that worked. It’s beyond silly to blame the creative inspiration for the work of uncreative followers.

His own work after Spongebob tends to split the difference between it and Officer, so he can’t be accused of milking the trend, even as the person with perhaps the most natural right to do so.

Suspect #2: Rusko

Speaking of milking, here is a picture of Rusko covered in dehydrated milk concentrate. What a coincidence!

Ok, plot the trajectory on this guy. Let’s call the late-2007 release of Spongebob time zero.

Rusko - SNES Dub (year -1)

Rusko - Cockney Thug (year 0)

This came out on his album before Spongebob, but I’m relatively certain Spongebob had been making the rounds on dubplate long before its release. Either way Rusko was definitely on the ground floor here and deserves innovation credit in addition to whatever debit he might incur as you scroll further down the list.

Rusko - Moaners (year 2)

This one was addressed to the segment of the community that “moaned” about his recent ouevre not really being dubstep. I apologize about the spoiler halfway through the post, but this is part of the reason I’m inclined to name Rusko as the ruiner of dubstep. It’s not even that bad a song as far as these things go, but maybe there was a better way to address the at-least-partial validity of the titular moans.

This would have been a good time to say for example, “You know what, you’re right, this isn’t really dubstep. The dub influence has really waned in my recent work. Now it’s all about the bassline. In fact maybe we should call it bassline!” It’s too late now, there’s already a genre called that that splintered off from hardstyle or some such horseshit, but at the time I think it would have been ok.

At this point Coki was doing his own thing and Rusko was very much steering the ship. As such, it was his call what do when a good chunk of the community balked, and his choice was to be defensive about it.

Admittedly at the time this was a silly argument about microgenre designations, and it is currently a silly argument about macrogenre designations. It’s hard to legitimately fault him for laughing off the criticism at the time when you could get a pretty accurate count of everyone in the world who cared in the slightest about dubstep by looking at dubstepforum.com’s membership count. It must have seemed a bit like Monty Python’s argument between People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front.

Now though, “dubstep”, as it is, is ubiquitous, and for those of us moaners who were kind of attached to its old identity, it is frustrating to find our signal-to-noise ratio worse than decimated because of what would have been an easily-avoidable taxonomical snafu.

That’s really my only salient point about Rusko, but I’ll carry on for one more tick on the timeline in the interest of being mean-spirited:

Rusko - Everyday (year 4)

So, yeah, there’s that.

And lest you think I just have a grudge against this guy for whatever reason, there is also this candid mea culpa:

You can probably guess that I take exception to his framing the problem as one of euphonious vs cacophonous, and of his characterization of “people” (viz the dubstep community as it was) loving it but really in their hearts wanting to rock out. But I have to give him credit for acknowledging that he is part of the problem, even if his proposed more-melodic way out doesn’t address my particular concerns so much as it does mire his already dubious music in the wretched tar-pit of trance.

Suspect #3: Skrillex

This is maybe a bit anticlimactic after resting my case against Rusko, but I have to mention him since he always comes up anyway and because I love this picture.

Skrillex released Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (as far as I will ever know, his only song) in 2010. By that time dubstep was what it was, through no fault of his own.

His didn’t really pollute the genre, and his only crimes are the grievous ones against humanity. It’s maybe not too late for him and Excision to form some sort of blue-ribbon committee to rechristen what they do as fartcore, but in all actuality I ain’t even mad.

Process

Rob and Goldie - Shadow (Rick Smith Process Mix)

Process; A Tomato Project ~ Rick Smith et al

the first few steps: the first few words: the first moment when a line crosses a line and suddenly you can never stop seeing. this changes — seeing more, seeing less, seing better, seeing worse; but seeing is the first stone in the pond, and as the ripples spread they alter everything they touch, fundamentally, everything takes on meaning — a look, a touch, a motion, a sign, all seeds growing, seeds that never stop growing because you just never can stop them.

how can it be explained? think of the one thing that you’e always wanted — then think of it existing within you, as a part of every day, like breathing. then think of the breathing as a living thing that begins to change, obeying only those elemental forces which we sense but can never see — and then it disappears. and then what? once you get it, what then? you just go on and on until you become what you always were — something simple and human. remember — it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it.

so why all the worry? why the need to possess, the need to claim, the need to feel like the one and only, the need to be ‘I’, the need to decide one thing against another, the need to sit on the top of the heap, the need to prove …? The fact of our individuality resides in us like the facts of our biology, and yet the hardest thing is to move on, to put this to one side and to be there for others, understanding and, finally, communicating. this is what makes us human, but still we want to be islands.


this would be the next step: to refuse to give in to those impulses of acceptance that trigger the mind and send us running after the rabbit around the track — to listen to the heart when we know, but we can’t explain, that this set of circumstances is wrong, that we could be doing this better, that we could be moving forward instead of standing still. it’s all a question of approach.

but how can an approach really be described? can it be described? the accumulation of experience lasts a lifetime, and encompasses both thinking and doing (and all the things in-between). these things do not exist in isolation.

closed structures: do we always need to force square pegs into round holes? so you go to school, and you always know what you want to do, and you know it can be done — and then you’re told it can’t. not even maybe, or yes if you work towards, but no, unequivocally, no. it can’t be done. how would you know until you tried? there are some shapes that can grow into others, some shapes that can change the shape of their container and some that grow out of it. it’s what happens. simple.

the simple things: like echoes of an afterthought, these little moments, little shifts, they grow into one another, and in growing they change each other, and as they change they become something new again — always having taken on and taken forward each other’s characteristics, like a shadow of a memory, and adding and learning and contributing, binding with consistency the loose possibilities that will contribute to our evolution.

it’s about moving. seeking out, involving, becoming. not a journey along a line to a fixed point when it will all happen, when it will all be clear, but a journey within a circle that explores and maps the possibilities that arise along the way. we are here. we are not yet there, or there: this is what it is. where are we going? from this moment to the next: from the centre to the perimeter and around, and back to where we came from, and then out again — finding, bringing back, showing, finding …

the process stays alive; it makes us human. thinking, acting, thinking again, accepting or refusing. we know it already. we have always known it, but we needed to apply our thoughts to our methods. we are all people. the thought is the process. the act is the process. we are people, not definitions, or even things. this is us, and we are in this world, and we are in this world together.

Juke and Footwork Primer + Mixes

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to post here. Maybe some music I like?

Words

Juke and footwork are largely interchangeable terms for a genre of music borne out of Chicago. It’s a regional counterpart to Detroit’s jit and Miami bass, which I believe originated in Tallahassee.

Like Miami bass, lots of hip-hop, and certain strains of house and electro, the juke sound is built on the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The 808 has snappy, thin snare and clap sounds coupled with perhaps the deepest bass drum in the business. “The 808 kick drum makes the girlies get dumb”, as Bill Cosby quipped. Juke exploits the 808 even further by showcasing its less-appreciated sounds, like the cowbell and the tom, which are used for syncopated fills at or around 160 beats per minute.

On this rhythmic base, juke songs usually feature short repeated samples, often vocals from hip-hop and r’n’b, often rendered inscrutable out of context, often at least moderately obnoxious or misogynistic. This can present a problem to some new listeners who feel like they don’t want to be insistently told to “twerk that ass” for five minutes, but I think they should stick with it. The best producers warp, slice, and change-up samples to keep things interesting, and the odd effect of words dissociating from their meaning after a lot of repetition lends the music a surreal edge.

Like a lot of dance-oriented music, it’s made to mix, and therefor listening to individual tracks doesn’t really give an accurate account. Songs can sound like they lack progression because they’re engineered to be parts of a bigger structure that you’re not getting, and they can sound overlong because there are parts at the ends that are tailor-made to be thrown away while the DJ beat-matches. So, with that in mind, I’m going to link a few mixes that might help you get a fair taste for the genre before Deadmau5 or one of his asymmetrically-coiffed lackeys get around to ruining it.

Music

DJ Rashad is arguably the best in the game, both in terms of production and mixing. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a tracklist for this, because it’s just about the best document on the genre to date:

Here he is with DJ Spinn, another of the big names, for FACT Magazine

Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq, has been releasing a bunch of juke from darker-sounding artists like DJ Nate and Young Smoke on his Planet Mu label. Some more accomplished genre-pigeonholers call this comparatively gritty sound “footwork” and its more dancefloor-oriented counterpart “juke”, but I’m not sure if that is a widely-accepted distinction.

Dave Q isn’t associated with juke specifically, but he’s a hell of a talented DJ, as this mix for Hotflush proves. Follow through to Mixcloud for the tracklist:

In a similar vein, this mix by Girl Unit contains only a few tracks that are definitively juke, but it is nonetheless a good showcase of how the genre is influencing other parts of the electronic music scene.

Addison Groove is perhaps the biggest juke producer outside of the Chicago metro area. If you don’t already know him from Footcrab, look that up, and also check out this mix from Bloc 2011:

That’s gotta be around six hours of juke, so I’ll call that good, but I enjoyed putting this together so I’ll probably update with more another day.