Laudable idea gek... the tricky part is executing it!
Dub wasn't totally alien, it was the result of specific cultural and musical factors in Jamaica at the time. Obviously it took a fair bit of genius to alchemize that into a radical form like dub, but the point is that new styles never emerge from a vacuum. There has to be cultural pressure within the scene to push them into being. What's interesting is when scenes split off from the mainstream and mutate within themselves - because in a closed-off scene with a small demographic reach, ideas can spread very quickly, and pull in all sorts of wierd stuff. I wrote about this a bit in a
blog piece i did on Clockwork Orange.
Playstation seems to be a massive part of the dubstep soundworld - a lot of the melodies and synth FX in the tracks lift ideas from the kind of incidental music you find in computor games. In a more lateral way, dubstep's paradoxical feeling of twitchy inertia references the playstation state of mind - physically slothlike, mentally hyper-alert. I spent a lot of my youth smoking weed, listening to hardcore and playing SNES - for a lot of jungle hedz this, rather than raving, was how the subculture operated on a daily basis, and dubstep seems to have internalized this impulse in the music and taken it onto the next stage. Because it's taking a feeling from jungle, rather than narrowly musical template, it doesnt sound anything like jungle to someone outside the scene - but if you've ridden with it for 10 years, the evolution of jungle into dubstep makes sense because it's pushing those same psychological buttons. I think this is what Kode 9 is getting at.
Dubstep now is in a similar position to jungle in '95 - during the crucial years of it's development it moved away from being purely 'dance' music because it was more of a radio/mixtape phenomenon than a club phenomenon. This liberated producers to explore more nuanced moods in the music, and push it into places that dance music on it's own couldn't go to. But as it's re-emerged, raves have got bigger and it's had to deal with the problem of getting the 'dance' back into the music without jettisoning what makes it unique. Jungle never really managed to do this - techstep and liquid d&b are far more successful
as dance music than '94-era artcore, but only because the producers have trimmed the music to fit the templates of more mainstream styles like house & trance, and lost the magic in the process. If dubstep has to move towards the mainstream, I hope the scene splits and leaves the spliffhead cargo-cult side behind as post-millenial mood music underground.
I'd disagree that the use of decontextualized cultural elements in this way is postmodernist - PoMo is inevitably ironic, and irony requires conscious mastery of the signs, whereas the use of consumer signifiers in dubstep and other 'nuum music is happening on a subconscious level which is why it comes out so jumbled. Whereas ironic use of signs de-intensifies thier alienness, subconscious use is about loading objects with private meaning - it's the foothills of schitzophrenia, basically. This process, where music splits off form the mainstream and starts to take on cult-like aspects, will become increasingly common as music de-centralizes through the communications networks of the 21st century - it doesnt seem to have a name yet (sectifying?).
Sorry, this is a rambling post and I'm straying into areas that I don't really have the theoretical knowledge to do justice to.