Why they call it 'Dubstep'?

nomos

Administrator
it could be better but i like saying it way more than grime.

it seems a little off though when you hear a plodding halfstep track that's all tech and no dub. lioness suggested we call it tecstep :p

apparently it was coined in XLR8R in 2002
 

Blackdown

nexKeysound
it's a corruption: from 2step to dubstep. 2step was vocal, the dub was the bassier, instrumental flip. the other sense of the word 'dub' ie from dub reggae, also made sense when the early pioneers sampled dub reggae records ie Ghost's 'Dancehall EP'.

as the sound's progressed the weight on the meaning from dub reggae has increased, whereas the weight from the 'opposite of vocal' has decreased.

and as someone already said, it came into use from Stelfox's and Kode 9's XLR8R piece, and Hatcha's Dubstep Allstars mix cd circa 2003.

techstep makes no sense, if you bought the late-90s dark d&b on No U Turn, Emotif etc that they called 'techstep' already.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
it's funny, i dunno where it really came from.
and, come to think of it, i'm not entirely sure that either i or steve were the first people to write it or even use it.
we'd certainly used it to talk about it together and i'm pretty sure i used it in muzik or some other dance rag, and that it probably cropped up on hyperdub, too. as ever, though, these things get said a lot before they get written down, so it was probably some dude in a bar who we never met a year or so before either of us and we'll never find out the truth!
of course, that bunch of pieces was about something quite different to what we're now calling dubstep, especially as it included sticky and jason kaye etc.
what we were really teasing out was the reggae influence at play in a lot of the deeper, more interesting, non-traditional 2step garage of the period; things like el-b and ghost stuff, horsepower productions (man, i listened to in fine style the other day and it's still a wonderful record) etc.
actually this created grime just as much and, arguably, moreso than what's known as dubstep now (and i don't mean these specific artists were grime forerunners - altho social circles definiely were - just that that soundsystem/reggae element is just as much, if not more, a part of grime's dna as it is dubstep's), so it was perhaps a bit misleading in retrospect.
of course quite a lot of the stuff out of the ammunition stable wasn't all that dubby at all and today's dubstep doesn't feel very dubby either, so i definitely agree, it's not that relevant any more.
let's find a new term, it's about time this one died, but i'm sorry techstep won't work!
 
Last edited:

DJ Lioness

Well-known member
autonomicforthepeople said:
it could be better but i like saying it way more than grime.

it seems a little off though when you hear a plodding halfstep track that's all tech and no dub. lioness suggested we call it tecstep :p

If this is implimented i want crediting :)

Also does anyone know the ID of a track with the sample, "when Jesus came the second time he couldnt call himself Jesus again". Or something similar.
 

nomos

Administrator
Blackdown said:
techstep makes no sense, if you bought the late-90s dark d&b on No U Turn, Emotif etc that they called 'techstep' already.
i know. that's why it's funny. ;)

yet it would also be a natural turn in naming. like i said before, "there is the theory of the moebius strip..."

LW444.jpg
LW445.jpg


'nuum
 
Last edited:

Blackdown

nexKeysound
producers get very angry when pseud journos/bloggers try and pin a name on them. i've always tried to stay out of making names up.
 

nomos

Administrator
I'm not sure if i'm a pseudo-something or not but my only point is that people take these names too seriously and so many get spun out that they inevitably pile back on top of each other (as in Fig. 1 & 2).

I like Kode 9's idea of 'hyperdub' as a non-genre simply reflecting the pervasiveness of dub memes within a larger musical mesh. A given track could be hyperdub and several other things all at once. For one thing, it saves people from getting red in the face trying to define what, where and who a sound is.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
Blackdown said:
producers get very angry when pseud journos/bloggers try and pin a name on them. i've always tried to stay out of making names up.

i don't necessarily think it's pseudism, really. a little neologism can be fun at times and reasonably useful, but the idea behind that particular set of pieces wasn't so much to define a genre anyway, more to identify a thread running thru a big mish-mash of stuff, which was what garage was at the time. i know horsepower didn't like being called dubstep.
 

jay-s

Active member
stelfox said:
it's funny, i dunno where it really came from.
and, come to think of it, i'm not entirely sure that either i or steve were the first people to write it or even use it.
not really 'dubstep', but in the november 2001 article about dark garage in deuce mag steve (i suppose it's the same person) used "spooky yet warm dub step vibe" to describe the sound of the ghost camp. i personally used that term ever since.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
yeah, it was definitely around that period that it began to be used.
i honestly think steve had more of a hand in it than me, but who can tell.
the xlr8r thing really solidified its use, which we were both involved in.
i'm trying to abdicate as much responsibility as possible here because i really don't like dubstep now!
 

Troy

31 Seconds
I'm new to this... and I wanted to find out what is this thing you call 'dubstep'. So I checked out a couple of mixes online and it sounds pretty close to heavy reggae dub to me...

1) Repetetive chest-crushing basslines.
2) Steady head-noddin robotic drums.
3) That triplet-time sound you get when they used to put the echo on the hi-hats in the old time dub, if you know what I mean.
4) Ganja atmosphere

Only thing missing is the heavy echo effects.

So lets call it dub techno or techno dub? (too cheesy?)

By the way, with STEP being so popular (2-step, techstep, darkstep) and CORE being so popular (hardcore, noisecore, wimpcore), when are we gonna hear a music called STEPCORE or CORESTEP???
 

mms

sometimes
i agree dubstep is a boring conjoining of two terms used to describe bits of other forms of music. technique and rhythm.
maybe it should follow in the canon of naming after places or imaginary places music takes place or originated from :
you know house
jungle
ghetto tech
even grime to an extent.
those are the safest and kind of best ways of describing a music - hyperdub is good but the hyperness is lost in the rather molasses half step sound.
 

stelfox

Beast of Burden
i don't know what else we could reasonably have called it!
dubstep may be boring, but if we follow the place-name idea it would have probably been "croydon" and that is not interesting, either.
having said that, though, i did see some of the best fights of my life in the very short space of time that i've spent there.
 

Freakaholic

not just an addiction
this is so eye opening.

since before joining this board, i was trying to define what the genre's called "dubstep" and "grime" were. and now i see that even the terms arent in popular use, since they cant describe the sound.

the more i learn, the more i know its undefined. all of this music is some sort of grey area in garage, it seems.

as far as critics and writers naming genres, hopefully we can stay away from that, as the results are generally no good.

remember this:

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2643
 

mms

sometimes
Freakaholic said:
this is so eye opening.

since before joining this board, i was trying to define what the genre's called "dubstep" and "grime" were. and now i see that even the terms arent in popular use, since they cant describe the sound.

the more i learn, the more i know its undefined. all of this music is some sort of grey area in garage, it seems.

as far as critics and writers naming genres, hopefully we can stay away from that, as the results are generally no good.

remember this:

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2643
:)

yeah that was me just trying to describe how some music sounded , definitley not trying to coin a genre as there isn't one there .
dubstep adequatley describres the sound in relation to 2step for sure but in 2006 the music doesnt sound so much like 2 step, croydon garage wouldn't make sense too as the sound is a bit bigger than it's roots now too.
really in all fairness it should still be called dubstep cos calling it something else now would be a wrong move .
 
Last edited:

nomos

Administrator
i'm still hoping some my bloody valentine fans will drop something we can call shoestep
 
Top