What exactly killed uk dubstep?
Dubstep. It is an obnoxious screeching genre of music. The mere mention of
the name dubstep spawns disgusted looks and harsh words and honestly that is
a reasonable response. However that awful genre of music shares a name with one
I hold close to my heart. A deep, expressive genre of electronic music that
shaped a generation in a sense and gave a soundtrack to the dark and depressing
modern England. But what happened to Dubstep and what exactly killed it?
It started as a rebellion to the Garage movement. ‘In the late 90s and early 2000s Garage was king’ . It was a flashy and eccentric genre that captured
and displayed the optimistic attitude that was common at that time. The imagery of garage was very similar to that of American hip hop, fancy clothes, fancy jewellery, opening champagne bottles on the dancefloor, just general eccentric behaviour. The Dubstep movement came around as the mirror opposite of garage, with the heavy bass lines of Dub music and the half step drum beat around 140bpm. A lot of influence was drawn from Jamaican Reggae/Dub music and from the surroundings of multicultural, modern London. As Martin Clark/Blackdown said, ‘if grime is the voice of angry urban london, dubstep is its primary echo, the sound of dread bass reflecting off decaying walls.’ This cultural melting pot bred a dark but soulful genre of music which was very much the underground sound of London and other British cities. (McFadyen, 2020), (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021)
The great indoor smoking ban of 2007 has to be one of the largest public
health interventions to ever happen in this country. Almost overnight, venues, restaurants, bars, and many other places were freed of a constant smoky haze. This change in the law had a great effect on the general publics health, with 1200 fewer heart attack deaths the year later. However the health of dubstep was seriously harmed by this new law. A lot of dubstep fans who would go to the shows smoked cannabis. This was a part of Dubstep culture, arguably borrowed from Jamaica, and a lot of people would come to the show to stand in the same place, smoke, and go on a musical journey with the DJ. Because that is what dubstep sets were, they were a deep, introspective musical journey. Now that you couldn’t smoke inside anymore people had to leave the set to smoke which absolutely killed the attention span of the listeners, you cannot go on a musical journey when you spend half the time outside the venue trying to keep your spliff lit. Mala notably spoke about this saying ‘for a crew with hard smokers, what happens with a smoking ban is that you have an audience that aren’t focused for the whole session. This ban on smoking completely shrunk peoples attention spans and slowly led and played into dubstep being about the drops, not the groove and the journey. (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021) (British Heart Foundation, 2017)
The genre started off as this very low end driven music, music you would only be able to truly experience on a massive sound system. As with every genre of music though, stylistic shifts occur and little did anyone know at the time but these stylistic shifts dug dubstep its own grave. In 2007, Caspa and Rusko released a mix cd called FabricLive.37. This is possibly the earliest example of the genre shifting in style, with heavier drums and modulated mid range basses throughout the mix different to the sub low rumble of previous artists. The mid range bass was audible on any set of speakers and suddenly listening to dubstep became infinitely more accessible to everyone. This new aggressive style of dubstep got named tearout dubstep and there was one dj/producer who was the pioneer of this sound – Coki. Songs like Goblin, Spongebob, and Horrid Henry were some of the heaviest and most mind blowing songs anyone had ever heard at the time and immediately triggered a shift in the scene towards the mid range high energy tearout beats that made Coki notorious. However, across the pond things were changing. The former First to Last lead singer Sonny Moore got his hands on these songs and started experimenting and making his own beats. First releasing a song called ‘hott new track’ under the name Skrillex, he developed his own tree branch of dubstep slowly but surely. In 2010 he changed the world of dubstep forever by releasing an EP called ‘My name is skrillex.’ This album changed the history of this genre of music so many people in the UK had grown to love. (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021) (Kerlinger C, 2022)
Dubstep was more than music to a lot of people, way more than music. While it was still at the end of the day club music, there was a community surrounding it that was a million times deeper than just music. Everyone had para-social connections to the artists, everyone knew all the tunes, all of the gossip. Dubstep stood for something way more significant and influential than just music. It was a way of life. An escape. A release for the people that loved it. That is what made the creation of American ‘brostep’ even more painful. My name is skrillex came out and people absolutely loved it. Dubstep reached America in about 2005 through Dave Q and Joe Nice, who were in love with electronic music in the uk and they put on a dubstep club night in Brooklyn. This made the genre gain traction overseas and soon everyone wanted a piece of that dubstep pie. Rihanna, Kanye, Jay-Z, and Korn all used dubstep influences in their music in the late 2000s. However by far the most popular person to find this genre, and the name everybody thinks of when you say dubstep, was Skrillex. After releasing his EP called my name is Skrillex in 2010 he took off to astronomical heights. His screeching, piercing beats captivated millions of americans and others around to world to not only listen, but to produce too. This could well have been the point of no return for the genre, because suddenly loads of people were making these obnoxious beats. (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021)
Now how did this new style of dubstep differ from tearout? Because tearout drops sound incredibly similar to brostep drops. Well first of all tearout songs while pushing boundaries, still stuck to the typical structure of a dubstep song where it is the same elements throughout just being introduced or taken out. And the bassline stays mostly the same. In a brostep song you have a dazzling ibiza style into which then suddenly transitions into a screech fest of modulated fm basses and pounding drums. The imagery around this kind of dubstep was drastically different as well, with everything being LED, hi viz, glowstick, bright and in your face. Same with the artwork for the records. This contrasts with tearout which once again stuck to the minimal and dark aesthetic dubstep had been known to have. It explains a lot as to why all of the original dubstep purists hate brostep to death, as it led to dubsteps relative death. (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021)
Dubstep is a commercial failure. A giant one. It became like the death metal of electronic music which is far from where it originated, out of jamaican dub music. The newfound heaviness of this genre caused people to completely fall in love with brostep and it soon became a very common theme in popular culture, especially with the dawn of the meme where the obnoxious screech was usually played for a few seconds in time for a joke to land. It became very prominent in soundtracks to video games and films, and this definitely points to why it died so quickly. Jamaican dub music had a very slow development, not even really leaving the country for the first decade of its life, yet dub is still going very strong and a good amount of people have a lot of love for the genre. Compare this with brostep which had a very sudden rise to fame and you may start to see why the genre was so ill fated. The faster something gains popularity, the faster it will fall. And brostep soared to massive heights, going from being unknown to being in every advert, film, and game. It went from being an introspective and soulful genre with a scene of adoring fans, to a commercial tool used to make something funny. Before long the name dubstep just became a joke to everyone and that is where it died for good I believe. (Dakota Pulse, 2021) (Timbah.On.Toast, 2021)
While the genre is still massively popular in both forms, dubstep and brostep, the name will always just be a joke, a gimmick. Uk dubstep isn’t completely dead though, there is still a thriving underground scene with nottingham especially creating a lot of buzz in the scene. The modern dubstep scene is very closely tied into grime and bassline music, and it is only going to get better and better. So this raises the question – is dubstep really dead or is the name simply just tarnished?
References
McFadyen, A. (2020) Croydon, community, Soundsystem Culture: Tracing the history of Dubstep, Red Bull. Available at: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/history-of-dubstep-music (Accessed: 15 January 2024).
Timbah.On.Toast. (2021) All my homies hate skrillex: A story about what happened with dubstep., YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/-hLlVVKRwk0?si=DeuL3w7r_V7-j-nd (Accessed: 15 January 2024).
Dakota Pulse. (2021) The commercial failure of Dubstep, DakotaPulse.com. Available at: https://www.dakotapulse.com/en/blog/the-commercial-failure-of-dubstep/ (Accessed: 15 January 2024).
Kerlinger, C. (2022) The death of dubstep: Why the genre fell out of favor | Ben Vaughn, Ben Vaughn. Available at: https://www.benvaughn.com/the-death-of-dubstep-why-the-genre-fell-out-of-favor/ (Accessed: 15 January 2024).
Graham, H. (2023) Why dubstep’s popularity fluctuates more than any genre, Magnetic Mag. Available at: https://www.magneticmag.com/2023/01/why-dubstep-popularity-fluctuates-more-than-any-genre (Accessed: 15 January 2024).