Follow the story of this uniquely British club sound via Red Bull's unparalleled lecture archive. Written by Alex McFadyen. Emerging in parallel to grime around the turn of the century, dubstep was created by a handful of younger teenagers and older heads in London who began experimenting with the basslines from their favourite garage records — notably the music of Steve Gurley , Zed Bias , J Da Flex , and El-B — and introducing dub and jungle elements to create a stripped-back, meditative sound.
Read Story. Discover more about the genre's beginnings, growth and evolution through Red Bull's vast archive of lectures and conversations -- and use the hyperlinked quotes within to jump right to that moment in each lecture. Nobody cool was there. It had a really bad reputation. And all of the other producers thought we were trying to be flash, but it was the cheapest way of getting there. Youngsta, on the right, was another key player in shaping the scene.
Hearing records by jungle legends like Moving Shadow soon had Skream experimenting with making music on his Playstation and, after he quickly tired of that, Fruity Loops. That's something that I had heard, and it really sort of made the difference from hearing the music to understanding what the culture over there was all about. It really inspired people like us to create a community for that music in our city, in LA.
Among those who pricked up their ears to the new sound was a musician named Sonny Moore, known to the wider world as Skrillex. According to Johnson, Skrillex, long a fan of dance music, attended early Smog shows and became enamored of the style.
Skrillex used to come to this club at the time, and be like 'hey, what's this song? This is cool. I think up until that point he had sort of been a buzzword around some of the producers, but it was really when Skrillex became a real phenomenon. To call Skrillex just a DJ and producer is to miss the point. I come from playing hardcore, and post-hardcore and screamo or whatever you want to call it.
I always drew to the most aggro-sounding type of stuff, but then again to the melodic stuff as well. I made that song with a blown speaker. His breakout release, the Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP, is a combination of electro, house, industrial, hip-hop, and of course dubstep, among others — all assembled in a way that calls attention to all the similarities between the various strains of EDM, as well as nearly anything you might hear on mainstream FM radio.
We can do whatever we want. It captures the whole point of punk, and the whole point of style as subculture. I got the same thrill when Skrillex said as much on The Grammys, of all places: We can do whatever we want. Exploding convention is part of the creative act. There is a certain mainstream type of dubstep — derisively known as "brostep" — that is voiding the rules of all those first-generation UK dubstep records, and causing a fair amount of consternation among purists in the process.
The most recognizable and most misused aspect of contemporary dubstep whether you consider it brostep or not is the "wub" or "wobble. It was with the wobble that bass moved from being a rarefied, "deep," contemplative sound to something more akin to a guitar riff. Homogenization through mechanization, software plugin-style. It keeps the listener off-balance, often vibrating, wobbling like the whole thing is about to tumble off beat into some kind of chaos.
Yet it doesn't. Until recently it would be a major feat to accumulate enough rack mount effects and pedals, and forget automation! Low frequency oscillators. Another popular trick is to take a MIDI track MIDI containing no audio itself; it is basically a sequence of parameters such as velocity, pitch, note length, etc. Everything moves together, the bass line doing double duty as a melodic line, while everything pulses and undulates sort of but not entirely out of sync with everything else.
The crowd went nuts for it, and a style — a style-within-a-style — was born. I guess you could blame my thick American ears, but this current iteration of dubstep sounds alright to me.
Some tracks are better than others. And some are pretty bad, but every genre has those. But when it works best, the producer makes a connection that few have dared before, the unholy union of doom-laden, downtempo heavy metal and roots reggae. Nothing more, nothing less. Bass, pace, and space. That's what I always thought was the best part of dubstep. And for a while it looked like dance music was about to take over the mainstream — a thought that horrified the purists, the ones for whom the scene was precious.
Then grunge happened. For a moment, it looked like all those blustery guitars and angry white dudes — "authentic" musicians — would wash away any hopes of electronic music taking over the mainstream.
What this did, instead, was send record labels scrambling to find the next mythic Seattle. It gave the world "electronica," acts like the Chemical Brothers and Crystal Method became MTV staples, and for a minute or two ravers in the United States were having arguments about whether dance music was mainstream, and what that meant to their local scenes and communities. Electronica never went away, even if radio stations stopped playing it alongside other alternative acts and MTV stopped playing videos altogether.
Instead, as artists like Moby increasingly integrated old fashioned songwriting into their electronic music, dance music production became the backbone of pop music.
They'll book a couple dubstep guys at Red Rocks in Colorado, a 10, person venue, and they'll pack it out with a couple headliners like Flux Pavillion and Skrillex.
That's the thing that really struck me about the rave scene. It has some longevity. It wasn't a flash in the pan after all. And a lot of these kids are getting into the scene through dubstep, dubstep is huge.
Everything is just done on a whole other level. There's a lot more money, and it's a lot more professional. Are there still parties, like 'rave parties' that happen in old warehouses or whatever? There are, that whole thing is still there, there's just like this whole new level. And that book ends on a fairly sort of downbeat. Basically, the idea was that the music will carry on, but it will never be as big as it was in the nineties.
It seemed like America was a lost cause, in terms of [dance music] being a mainstream thing. When you've gone from events where there's a thousand or fifteen hundred people you feel like you're in a massive — the jungle term, the 'massive.
And then I noticed there were lots of different events in bars, and people were doing more talking than dancing. In the mids everything just sort of seemed to sort of be declining. Anyhow, I'd seen some of the coverage of it… and I really did feel like you know, history repeating. You had the massive event, the crazy clothes, and people dying.
And the public outcry, and the crackdown, and I think they had to move the operation out to Las Vegas… and it seemed exactly like a repeat of what happened in the 90s, and I wasn't expecting it. As Reynolds recently described it in the Guardian , rave peaked for America in the s.
But a lot has changed in the intervening fifteen years or so: The rave scene pulled back for a while, and eventually became rebranded as EDM. The word "rave" has been replaced by "festival. In house culture, or even dubstep in Britain, there's a lot of referencing of roots reggae, or the early days of house, or the early days of jungle.
In dance culture, the purist stuff, there's sort of this in-built reverence to the past. And what I liked about the EDM vibe, there's none of that: it's just like 'now, now, now. Dubstep was initially marketed for its huge base lines.
Electronic dance music in London at the time were not incorporating the huge baselines into their music and this helped to distinguish the dubstep category from electronic dance music. Forward also ran its own underground radio station Rinse FM which helped promote new dubstep artists airing their music were the conventional radio stations were not yet airi The most significant style of dubstep that has mutated is the genre of brostep. Currently in the United States brostep is what is mainly heard when people think of dubstep.
Brostep is defined by the dubstep community as harsh, aggressive, metal-esque, using aggressive sounding timbres and distorted bass riffs to mimic electric guitar. Many of the original artists who helped grow the dubstep genre have openly stated how brostep is hurting the genre as when people associate music to dubstep they assume that artists like Skrillex who use the angry aggressive style of Brostep are the real dubstep.
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