Laugh At What I Love - Dubstep

Everybody hates dubstep. Until it’s 3am and we’re hanging out in one altered state or another. Somebody calls up a playlist, mixed cd, Soundcloud mix, or plugs in their phone and wouldn’t you fucking know: nobody hates dubstep!

I’m one of those people that rides or dies for the shit I like, regardless of its hipster stock! Dubstep has been consistently ridiculed, memed, and dismissed as something descended from aliens intended to destroy us all! As its commercial appeal has grown so has its detractors.

I’m old school. I remember 6Blocc when he was RAW. I remember when Jason Blakemore was DJ Trance. I remember when you could break into a warehouse and throw a party without the cops treating you like a murder suspect. We were kids! We were on drugs! We wanted to fucking dance! Techno became breaks and hardcore and jungle, jungle became drum & bass, breaks got funky, trance traveled to Goa, hardcore went for hell’s bells at hundreds of beats per minute. House music finally got less deep.

I never stopped loving the music! I did stop enjoying the ticket prices of the larger and larger scale massives, and missed the intimacy of some Boys’ and Girls’ club in some part of town I’d never be if I wasn’t frying my balls off! I couldn’t keep up. I needed to slow down. There was a cliff approaching and I wasn’t ready to Thelma and Louise that baby just yet. Eventually I stopped going. I wasn’t the only one. I’m not going to be that guy who shits on what was once great! It is was it is. The scene, the lifestyle, the magazines, the djs, they all changed. It’s was good thing. I didn’t hate it at all. I do make fun of it now and then, but the music will always be special to me.

Enter dubstep. It’s like some trip hop and some drum and bass make sweet, sweet love and gave birth to some pretty chilled out shit! Then it came stateside, beefed up on pink slime and transfats and started shaving the sides of its head.

I’m no expert on the timeline but that about sums it up for the lay person. I must admit I’m no dubstep aficionado. Just a guy who likes to party and wobble my bass occasionally.

I think dubstep is pretty badass. Whether dancing, huddling in a speaker, or fast rap freestyling, dubstep is dope! It’s not something I regularly bump. I don’t wake up Sunday morning with a hangover talking about somebody bump some Sub Focus remix of Rusko. But dubstep has it’s place and time. I don’t even know that many dubstep DJs. I’m so through trying to be an expert on every subgenre’s post-genre. I know my roomie’s always bumping some mix from some dude from Holland or something. And for the record, Skrillex might look like your lesbian college roommate, but dude brings some fucking heavy!

Dubstep has been the soundtrack to many a bad ass night. Whether it’s the power up prior to some debauchery, or the sonic landscape to a full blown technotronic adventure, dubstep fits the bill. Like drum and bass, it’s the perfect R&B and pop remixer, adding some wobbly to your least favorite radio tracks. It’s also makes for a gnarly, dark sonic backdrop for getting into all kinds of trouble. It has this metropolitan aesthetic that makes me feel like I’m hauling ass on the 110 freeway with Staple Center on the left and some kind of insanity on the horizon. It’s the kind of music your cousins from Oklahoma wouldn’t be caught dead bumping, because if they were bumping it they might actually end up dead. It’s the kind of music that makes your relatives from the rest of America look at you like an extraterrestrial. And that’s its appeal!

If gabber is descended from the techno gods, dubstep is piloting the mothership of an invading and hostile alien species ready to shove mollies down your throat and make you violently rub your nipples tils they chafe!

Yeah, so there’s the car commercials, the consumer marketing association with urban and futuristic. There’s Skrillex’s food truck called, wait for it.. Grillex. But that’s fine with me. It’s kind of like when one of these little bands we’d die for makes it onto the Starbuck’s mix. Some would immediately burn all the evidence. Deny that the music ever inhabited the iPod. Not us, I root for music I love to become commercially viable because I know first hand how hard it is to make a living as a musician, DJ, rapper, or producer. So more power to ‘em! Blow up! If you ever hear my music attempting to convince you to drive some new fangled intelli-car, I hope you’d celebrate my success. For now it’s back to the basement. And I’m good with that too.

Dubstep, in its American form (Brostep?) can be too much. It can overpower the senses and make you skip the track with the quickness if it comes on at the wrong time. But when it comes on at just the right moment, randomly or by design, there’s nothing better. No music gets the taint forest standing at attention better!

So Fuck you and your jumpship! I’m no bandwagonner, but I’m on the dubstep train. Buh wah wah wah womp wah wah wah! Whether you’ll admit it or not, go ahead, laugh at what I love!