The Museum would like to share an article about how Skrillex and other Amurricans are murdering the genre you fratboys know and love as DUBSTEP. While this article isn’t post-ironic or a fallacy itself, we feel that it serves well as a centerpiece for conversation of “what is music?”, “Art is Dead, rather, Dubstep is Dead”, and “<3 <3 SKRELLIX (sp?) <3” in 2011.
Please enjoy; thanks to BlagSound.com and LessThan3 for posting it.
So it’s been taking the world by storm for a while now. Dubstep is everywhere. We all know about it, many of us love it, but there’s a massive problem brewing……the yanks have got hold of it!
At the moment there is a wave of American producers coming into Dubstep from other genres. These producers are flooding the genre with horrible mid range wobbled melodic shit, they have an addiction to the almighty ‘filth’. It’s gored-out mosh music as opposed to dance music. Not to say these beatmakers don’t have talent. Take Skrillex for example, some of his intro’s are rare, the melodic trancey intro for ‘Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites’ is extremely well produced and is something not a lot of artists can do. His production is tight…….then comes the drop. The song turns from a catchy, trancey rhythm into a violent racket of overwhelming wobbles.
His sound after the drop is plain and simple and there is a fairly long list of American producers I could say the same about. The bass is growly and reminds me of nails on a chalkboard, it’s just all a little silly and a million miles away from the garage and dub inspired scenes here in Britain that we all know and love.
……and this is what we are fighting for.
The yanks are generally giving the genre a bad name, like they do with everything. No wonder I keep on hearing the words ‘The Death of Dubstep’. Hearing shit from producers such as Skrillex, Excision and Figure is heartbreaking. They are butchering the sound of Dubstep and calling it Dubstep. It’s like sticking your cock in Vanessa Feltz and telling everyone you fucked Shakira.
Skrillex, released his first EP on the Mau5trap label, that helped him gain notoriety very very quickly. Due to the backing of the Mau5 machine all 8 tracks off his first EP were in Beatports top 10. It’s a great achievement but if the core beatport user base (which hasn’t really acknowledged Dubstep that much as yet) is going to finally acknowledge the genre through an artist like Skrillex and his peers, then I worry for the future. The music being produced stateside is doing a dangerous disservice to the genre, to me it feels like the exact opposite to where it all began on the streets of Croydon ten years ago when garage flaked out and evolved into dark garage, which eventually became dubstep.
Now, there could be some producers over in Uncle Sam’s land that don’t produce this terrible gorestep. I don’t know. In fact there are bound to be, but I’m going on the producers that have gained reputations the quickest and are big names over there. Now I’m not picking on these guys, they have found a way to be successful and have hit a chord with Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. They are mad for it over there. Unfortunately they are not mad for the sound us Brits went mad for. I know I’d rather be wanked off by Freddie Kruger wearing a wire brush round his palm, than go out and listen to that trash.
I keep hearing people say that the genre needs to evolve, they are right, it does, every genre does to an extent, especially a relatively new one such as Dubstep. To have longevity, evolution of a sound is a must. The problem is that there is a difference between evolution and perversion. Dubstep is going through both processes at once and the results couldn’t be further apart.
It’s definitely going to be interesting to see where we are heading. This violent pony that Skrillex and co. are producing is not going to go away. Not while the record companies have these money making machines on their hands. Capitalism will rear its ugly head and if they are making money, that’s it and if I’m honest, aslong as the sound doesn’t start influencing young, talented producers here in the UK, I don’t care. There is however, a problem in identifying what dubstep is these days. To me it will always be the garage induced, reggae dub deliciousness we have been hearing from the Benga’s and Skream’s of the world for a few years now. Unfortunately to some, it includes sounds that are so far apart from what I and many others perceive it as. At the end of the day, difference in opinion is what makes the world go round.
Dubstep started in London, in Britain. No it’s not dead, its just dead in the states. In the states, people go to dubstep raves and people die, here, people come to party and be proud of the sound we gave the world. It’s just unfortunate the Americans have butchered it just like everything else they get their hands on.
