The story begins in 2005. The scene is London (and before very long, Bristol). UK Garage, at least as known in tracks like Sweet like Chocolate by Shanks and Bigfoot and Do You Really Like It by DJ Pied Piper, is very much gone from the clubs...
...they're playing deeper, darker, bassier shit now.
Crime's on the rise in crummy boroughs like Hackney and Croydon, and it turns out living there are a few young 20-somethings that own computers and some budget pro-grade audio equipment. They live in depressing grey tower blocks, hold down shit jobs and are bessies with misfits and drug dealers. Thankfully, policing of weed in London is some of the laxest it's ever been - marijuana's just been made class C - so everybody in the council flats is getting fucking blazed and chilling out to dub music.1 Out of all this come the young grandfathers of the scene:
- Skream
- Benga
- Digital Mystikz
- N-Type
- Cotti
- Hatcha
- Scuba
- Ramadanman
- Kromestar
And a plethora of others. Their music has two critical characteristics:
- Loud, deep sub-basslines
- A half-time snare
Though their approaches vary - Skream opts for tetchy, evolving percussion arrangements and a spacey sound, Scuba (as his name suggests) puts you underwater with nautically-themed bass textures and aquatic fx - they all have these two features in common.2 They're also defining characteristics of dub music - so now you know where the genre got its name. Ketamine also got very popular around this time - I knew a lot of people who liked nothing better than to consume varying amounts of k and forget their worries in front a very big subwoofer in the dark somewhere.3
Every pirate station DJ worth his salt is playing the heck out of Skream's Midnight Request Line, along with loads of other cuts, on the B-sides of breaks records or being released by Tempa Records, the first home of dubstep. On the internet, a few radio stations dedicated to underground London dance music like sub.fm kick off, becoming very popular and, in my opinion, one of the main reasons we're not only just hearing about the genre in 2012. Myspace music pages and demo tracks sent by AIM are the main communications channels of the scene. If you were particularly big, you might have a few uploads on YouTube, but it was far from the common thing it is today (remember learning about adding "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL? Good times).
2006, now - Skream has released his seminal album, Skream!; Soul Jazz has released the imaginatively-named Box of Dub (1 and 2). Dubstep is, somehow, starting to leave the squat raves and seedy house parties in Wandsworth, and starting to appear in adverts, the BBC is starting to run stories on it, all that shit. Colour me slightly surprised - I thought it was going to be Arctic Monkeys and The Arcade Fire on the radio until the fucking extinction of the human race.
Jumping ahead to 2008, it's about the time that tracks like Murda Sound by Bar9 start coming out - that subtle bass texture that was getting used more and more between 2006-2008 in tracks like Iron Dread by Kromestar are getting exaggerated and blown up until they become growling, buzzing freakshows, helped along by the arrival of jump-up drum and bass in the clubs, like the seminal Machete by DJ Hazard.
The crown jewel of this little turn is Caspa's remix of Where's My Money, which, as I recall, was dropped several times at any respectable night for a period of a few months (to my slight chagrin - come on, guys, it's not that great, jeez). This kind of stuff was tentatively called 'bassweight' for a little while, a label which never stuck. I liked 'wubdub', myself.
Not long after, Nero came along and shook things up, really bringing the gnarly, extremely rich bass texture to the fore. A good example of this is one of their later tracks before they lost relevance, Innocence. I note that this was remixed by Skrillex, and is probably round about where he started getting noticed - he followed that up neatly by getting Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites remixed by Noisia, which is when I first heard of him.
Various stuff happens between then and now - I went to university, for one, meaning I couldn't put as much time as I would have liked into music, and consequently I can't comment very much on the scene at the time - but I do know that artists like Cookie Monsta and especially Borgore (with the hit which launched him, Nympho) started appearing and being more popular than the old hands like Skream, and any and every goddamn track you could think of was getting remixed into dubstep.
The big, buzzy bass sound that everyone knows and loves(!) about dubstep today had become, apparently, the entire point of the music. Producer friends in my classes were purposefully doing dubstep remixes of stuff just for pageviews, hoping to go viral. It was round about then I knew that dubstep was going to diverge - pointless crap for the mouthbreathers, with the old guard still doing their thing and innovating like since the beginning. Benga and the like are still playing sellout shows around the world, so there's hope yet. In terms of good new directions in dub these days, there's the future dub thing that's been going on since Hyperdub started up in 2004 that got all mixed up with the Planet Mu crowd, and extremely pleasing vibes have been coming from their direction - plenty of stuff of that nature is making itself known on Boomkat.
An important note: there's a hell of a lot I've left out here. I've kind of made out that the only influences on dubstep were dub and garage, and mentioned nothing about the absolutely huge selection of influences on the genre - a byproduct of half growing up in London and half on the internet. Apart from what I've mentioned, it got mixed up with bassline, glitch, jungle, house, techno, electro, grime, nu-rave, and a million other things ranging from serialist breakcore to ethnic African music. All of them were appropriate styles.
I guess I'll round out with some of my favourites from down the ages:
- Skream - Dutch Flowerz
My favourite from Skream!. - King Soly - Tamil Dub
"Marijuana is harmless..." - Kromestar - Rainy Dayz
If you want to hear the dub roots of dubstep, just put on any Kromestar track. - The Others - Africa
Just about as tasty as wub ever got. - Excision - Do it Now
Pleasantly deep, and then grotty. - Ed Solo & Skool of Thought - Sludge
Fun! Off a slightly rebellious "more profits for artists" album that never received as much attention as it ought to have, in my opinion.
- It's that kind of time when you can head to a drum and bass night and, at around 2am, rely on catching that overpowering tang of dry ice and ganja smoke in the top of your nose. You poor fellas in the states.
- A note on Burial here. He started in 2006 with a beautiful self-titled debut album, full of street lights flickering in alleyways and pregnant teens hiding their faces at McDonalds. Despite the allegations to the contrary, I can't identify any way, shape or form in which it constitutes dubstep. Just about the closest he ever got was his track Archangel, which had a regular bassline and a 2-step rhythm. However, if you tried playing that in a club, now or ever, people would just get confused - it hasn't got anything even remotely resembling impact. That track, like many of his, are what I'd call ambient breakbeat.
- Maybe I'm making out the connection between early dubstep and depressant drug consumption to be too strong. If nothing else, they do at least go well together. I'm not sure it was ever formally shown there was a link between an area's ecstasy and cocaine saturation and drum and bass/breakcore nights, but that makes sense, too.
This excellent article comes to us from Will Berg (aka DJ Niceberg on SoundCloud).
Make sure to check out some of his tunes!
No comments:
Post a Comment