Some Music: October 2011

The question from Always_the_gentleman:

"Can someone please explain what dubstep, as a musical genre, is? From what I've seen it's generally dance music but with a coda where the tempo slows and the sounds goes WUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUB and then shifts back to normal timing. Am I missing something?"

The answer from chrs_1979:

The essence of dubstep is not the WUBWUBWUB bass lines, it is the uniquely slow (for dance music) drum beat at 70 bpm (beats per minute). For reference, house music is around 120 bpm, which works out at around 2 beats per second. However, this beat is a half-time beat, meaning that other musical layers (usually the bassline) play at double speed, or 140 bpm. This is the most strict definiton of dubstep, and as you can see it does not describe very much about the style. This explanation covers the "dub" of "dubstep".

As the drum beat is so slow and sparse, producers often make it more interesting by syncopating them, meaning they add snares or high hats that do not generally fit a 4/4 rhythm. Most producers borrowed from UK garage in the early days of the genre, specifically the 2-step beat. Click here if you want a good example of that beat. Now we have the "step" part of the genre, and as you can see the term is soley concerned with the beat. Electronic producers have free reign over what other music goes along with the beat, but it often involves heavy use of samples, chopped up vocals and insane synths. This is accurate for dubstep that was produced 5-6 years ago, as the genre was in its infancy and producers where trying many different things. The significance of the beat is because it entails a certain dance, as well as how it can be mixed by DJs.

A few other details you should know is that it was first produced in South East London and was fairly popular in underground music scenes beginning in about 2006, but I'm sure you could argue earlier as well. It came out of the wake of garage and drum n bass (to an extent) as garage became more mainstream. It incorperated the laid-back tempos of dub, and focused on repetitive, hypnotic rythms, often being quite minimalistic, in contrast to garage it very rarely has any proper vocals. The dance you do to it is know as skanking, as you cannot dance to it like you would house.

As the dubstep (brostep) that is popular today, it emerged as the genre became larger and in some ways more homogenous. It once was very experimental, but the experiments into the 140bpm insane basslines proved to be very popular to certain crowds, and have stuck.
Here is a selection of older "proper" dubstep - I recommend listening to them all [Embedded below]

Skream - Midnight Request Line | Digital Mysticz - Anti-War Dub | Mala - Changes | Mala - Alicia | Martyn - All I Have is Memories | Kode9 - Black Sun | James Blake - Sparing the Horses