The thing I love about dubstep is that it's loud as shit. That's all I knew about it two years ago when I started working at an Italian deli with my go-to on all things electronic, Alex. It's loud, angry and transgressive—exactly the things I liked about punk rock when I wore those Sex Pistols T-shirts at the converted Alcoholics Anonymous house that hosted all the high school punks' mosh pit shows. But I don't care as much about the antiestablishment rhetoric as I used to. In hindsight, lyrics from bands like Anti-Flag and the Exploited are laughable, and dubstep fixes that by usually not saying anything.
Dubstep is sort of the rascal son of dub. Dub itself is derived from reggae grooves, typically manipulating the bassbeat down to one long, slow note—called a wobble for how it, quite literally, bobs back and forth. It was born in London, but the source material is unmistakably imported from Jamaica.
Dub's influence ranges pretty wide from house to post-punk. But its most direct descendent is probably dubstep, using the same method of slowing down soundwaves until you can hear them—the peaks and valleys wobbling back and forth. That's where the term wobble comes from. The other onomatopoeia commonly applied to dubstep is the whomp. It's when the quaking wobbles turn from soft tides to a tsunami, amplifying the effects to an alarming magnitude.
There are variations, of course, and you certainly don't need any columnist with a stupid mugshot to tell you the differences between DJs like Bassnectar and Cookie Monster. Over the last ten years producers have stretched dubstep to a variety of styles and textures, but to this point one of dubstep's enduring qualities has not been what's been done with it but rather what's not been done with it—singing.
The biggest struggle in electronic music is instilling an element of performance. It sounds impersonal and detached, and it's hard to make any real connection with something that sounds like it's coming from a pixilated video game. A lot of it thrives in this atmosphere, amplifying dance music to extreme limits. Dizzee Rascal is maybe the first to use whomps to properly soundtrack his barking rhymes. But the more tender moments of dub have mostly fallen flat when paired with vocal tracks. That is, until German producer James Blake's selftitled debut LP. He often Auto-tunes his voice and invokes Antony Hegarty's deep-throated wails. He makes dub music, but it sounds like R&B. The allusions to a blurred D'Angelo in his music video come through sonically as well.
It's on the fringe of dub, but only because it's actually something else. It uses the same wobbles of dub, but only to portray more pop-minded music. At the end of the day, whomps and wobbles are just sounds, like guitar strings and drum heads. And while dub and dubstep are compelling examples that have produced more than a few fruitful exports, the future is what happens when dub and dubstep are just underscores within pop music. It's not always enough just to be loud or sonically explosive, though; and like everything else, it will eventually get bastardized and we'll be forced to hear trite incarnations and awful lyrics about misinformed politics, just like those crappy punk rock bands I listened to in high school. But if that's the kind of thing we need to put up with to hear more albums on par with James Blake's debut, so be it.
Are you eagerly anticipating dubstep's devolution into songs with awful lyrics and misinformed politics? Then tell Kyle he can take his James Blake music and shove it at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
