A Year of Music

For a long time, “dubstep” was more or less a free signifier very loosely attached to the music made by a small group of British producers who all knew each other. It was mentioned in print – when it was mentioned at all – by electronic music cognoscenti like Simon Reynolds and Woebot, had a loyal, tiny internet following and was otherwise very much a London scene nobody else knew or cared about. A couple of years ago, though, it became a Thing – it got written about in music magazines, had its own club nights all over the world, generated a couple different series of compilations, and got a lot of breathless hype from Mary Anne Hobbs over high-profile remixes of indie artists. Its sudden popularity caused Simon to instantly pronounce it dead, the producers to start grumbling about how the newcomers just don’t get it, and all the other things kids in the underground do when they suddenly find themselves confronting an expectant public they were never particularly interested in meeting.

Still and all, it’s weird to watch people police dubstep’s margins, to watch fans and DJs try to issue decrees about what is and isn’t proper dubstep. It’s a warning sign that classicism is setting in, and that people are trying to own a style – something that’s patently impossible. That usually coincides with me losing all interest in the style for a while, because being obsessed with “the classics” gets tedious in a hurry. This happened in a major way to Detroit techno, and as a result, there’s been very little new music from Detroit that’s genuinely excited me for a long time. I’ve heard stuff that’s insanely well-crafted and that moved me, but none of it has struck me as all that innovative or different.

I bring all this up because I was reading Blackdown’s newest monthly summary of the dubstep and grime scenes, and something about it set off my bullshit alarm (emphasis mine):

There’s something very timely about Oneman’s selection. Between the rise of funky, Mala’s continuing “broken dub house” direction, and the return of the 2step influence to dubstep, be it through Burial’s beats, Geiom’s “Reminisin’”, most of TRG’s productions, Martyn’s selection or Kode9’s sets, the vital link from dubstep to “house and garage” seems to be rejuvenating (in an interesting parallel to the Berlin/Bristol dubstep/techno axis). Oneman is most definitely at the forefront of this, going so far back in the dubstep continuum that old becomes new, classic sounds fresh, when placed in relation to the dominant styles that fill the bulk of dubstep in 2008. Plus, to much of his audience, pre-2005 or even pre-2006 dubstep is new ground, and that’s not even touching the vast number of current fans who wrote off UK garage in its entirety.

and

To say TRG’s sound owes a debt to Horsepower and to a lesser extent, early Zed Bias, would be an understatement. But set in the context of dubstep’s recent output, there’s something refreshingly welcome to the re-emphasis of swing and rhythmic variation (2008 dubstep producer in “snares-not-on-the-third-beat shocker!”). Increasingly there is the sense that if someone doesn’t re-ignite this style, it might be lost from dubstep’s canon for good. 2002 it seems, is the new 2008.

Come on, dude, 2002 was only 6 years ago. There’s a ton of records coming out that are still obviously indebted to the old garage sound, and the free interplay between dubstep, grime and newer UK garage (funky house and bassline house most specifically – read his past columns for more details on those styles. Blackdown knows the score) makes it pretty clear that the only ghetto dubstep is in is one consciously created by its critics and fans. It’s a little early to be talking about dubstep having lost its hardcore.

At the same time, I think I see his point, or maybe a version of it. Specifically, there’s a whole crowd of drum’n’bass producers – most prominently Tech Itch, who should know better – who seem to hell-bent on translating their fun-free mechanical techstep idiom into something that sounds the same as their usual, idea-free crap but runs half as fast. UK garage was a reaction against exactly that kind of tedious one-note darkness, and although I love Tech Itch’s old drum’n’bass, I really wish they’d leave dubstep alone. At least until they actually engage with all the stuff that happened since dnb and dubstep ended up on parallel paths.

I do really enjoy the totally uptempo, dancefloor-oriented dubstep that folks like Skream!, Caspa and Rusko are making. It’s plastic and pop, and it ditches the weirdness and obsession with dubstep’s musical dialectic with itself that makes artists like Shackleton, Burial and Various Production so interesting. Rusko’s “Jahova”, Distance’s “Traffic” and Skream!’s “Check It” are all slick as whaleshit, and sound even slicker in the mix, but they’re all fun, bass-heavy dancefloor stompers. As DJs crews, Skream! and Caspa & Rusko are unapologetically prejudiced in favor of ass-shaking, and they put together very consistent, slick sets that still encompass a lot of dubstep’s diversity while still being clubber friendly.

I think the club-friendliness is probably the main thing that bugs Blackdown and people like him. It sucks to watch your special thing go mainstream, especially when the people doing the mainstreaming don’t seem to understand what it was that made it interesting or cool in the first place. Maybe it’s easier for me to not care because I’m only a casual bystander (although I’ve listened to a lot of dubstep and grime in the past few years). I don’t know. I’m just wary of the impulse to build a canon, to worship the classics. A good tune will remain a good tune forever, but if you fasten upon the classics of the past, you might miss the classics of the future.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Check It” by Skream!, perhaps the most irritatingly bright’n’cheery track currently popular in dubstep, with its martial rhythms and major-key plastic synths. It sounds like a particularly uptempo dancehall track from about 20 years ago and is brutally infectious. It would be unbearable were it not for the vocal break, with its combination of tough drumline percussion, rapidly stuttering bassline, and Warrior Queen’s MCing (which, like a lot of dubstep vocals, blurs the line between grime chanting and dancehall toasting). Skream! is mostly known for his “Midnight Request Line”, which is famous both on its own and a frequently-used grime riddim, but I think I would be much more likely to reach for “Check It” (which seems to pop up in mixes under a variety of different names) if I were still a DJ. “Midnight Request Line” has the catchy synths and is a much more traditional dubstep roller, but “Check It” is glossy, tough dance music of the highest order.

Hard on the heels of my post on Fucked Up and Kelefa Sanneh’s laudable efforts to get them noticed by New York Times readers, I bring to your attention this excellent article by him about dubstep’s ongoing half-assed attempt to penetrate the American gestalt. He does a great job with the nearly intractable problem of describing dubstep (a thing more defined by what it’s not than what it is) and he does it without talking down to the audience. He’s now my favorite critic writing for the Times.

Even though Surgeon got his start ripping off Jeff Mills, both in his production and DJ styles, his DJing sounds much better these days the further he strays from his hard techno roots. Listen to one of his DJ sets where he plays edgy dubstep like Vex’d’s “Fire” and straight-up industrial noise like Whitehouse (or even the bizarre punk-funk glitch edit of “Iron Man” he busts out in his live set from Emergency a year or so ago), and compare it to the sets where he stays within the confines of the techno ghetto, and it’s striking how much more fun and loose the former are.

Q: What’s even better than Shackleton’s unique take on dubstep, as heard on Skull Disco: Soundboy Punishments?

A: Shackleton mixed by Dubsta! If you already have Soundboy Punishments, prepare to hear Shackleton’s Levantine melodies, clattering rhythms and deep-assed bass in a whole new way, and if you don’t have it yet, prepare to be convinced you need it!

UPDATE: Aw damn, Skull Disco decided to take the mix down, and the replacment DubSTa mix they put up is similarly unavailable. Just go out and buy Soundboy Punishments instead.

(h/t to Blackdown Soundboy for his excellent interview with Shackleton from 2006, which is when I discovered Shackleton picked up this mix myself.)

Pinch’s Underwater Dancehall seems to be another in a long series of dance music albums that’s intended to bust out of the artistic ghetto from which it emerged. The production is bright and sparkly and about half the guest vocals are the kind of melismatic R&B that producers have been using to appeal to an imaginary “mainstream” since Soul II Soul, if not since Giorgio Moroder started working with Donna Summer[1]. More damningly, since both the vocal and instrumental versions of the tracks are included on the album, it’s possible to hear just how gratuitous those vocals really are. There’s nothing wrong with being tooled for a broad audience in theory, but in this context (and maybe it’s just how it’s striking me tonight) it comes across as possibly a little over-eager and most definitely too busy (“Brighter Day”, for instance, works much better – works perfectly, in fact – as an instrumental, which is too bad, because the vocal would be appealing in a less crowded setting). About a third of the album is spooky and compulsive listening, a third doesn’t do much for me and a third is plasticky faux-soul / faux-dancehall / faux-R&B that makes me itch. I think I’d like it twice as much if Pinch had chosen one each from the vocal and dub versions, and had jettisoned the wailing divas.

1: that this produced “I Feel Love”, quite possibly one of the finest dancefloor tracks of all time is, uh, HEY LOOK OVER THERE IT’S A BEAR.