I said:
"Dubstep tends to resemble post-97 d&b slowed down more than it does pre-97 d&b slowed down, which is maybe 80% of what prevents the genre from fulfilling its potential."
and Blackdown said:
"this isn't true. there are parts that do resemble it, but much that doesn't."
But I'm sticking with my original statement. Strictly speaking, classic 2-step garage also tended to resemble post-97 d&b more than it did pre-97 d&b. Listen to most 2-step garage and the beat is relatively simple in its construction, and it doesn't really change throughout the track.
Of course 2-step sounded much more interestingly syncopated than post-97 d&b most of the time. But that's mainly because syncopation sounds more, er, syncopated, at 135bpm than at 170bpm. I remember one person described MJ Cole's "Attitude" as sounding like a post-97 d&b track played at 33 instead of 45, and I scoffed, but I went back and listened to it and realised that they were kinda right. It's just that "Attitude" at 170 bpm wouldn't have sounded nearly as good of course!
Dubstep isn't really more <i>or</i> less intricate rhythmically than 2-step garage, it's just constructed a bit differently (excluding halfstep, which is obviously less intricate but deliberately so, its absences implying an intentional substraction of intricacy).
Both UK Garage and dubstep have their share of more intricate tracks that mirror the sort of rhythmic layering effect you get in pre-97, but I think these have been the exception rather than the rule. I have this notion that this is as much to do with Timbaland as techstep: Timbaland's early stuff really ran with the simple mindbending loop that can be repeated ad inifinitum throughout the track but never gets boring.
Whereas up to 96/97 or so, D&B was still in a post-hardcore phase of taking disparate elements and pushing them together to achieve mindbending complexity via layering - most of the best jungle tunes from a rhythmic perspective were those with several breaks interacting at the same time. This also encouraged tunes to morph and mutate throughout their duration much more readily (arguably due to ardkore's short-attention-span approach to ideas). (as a sidenote, the genres which actually remind me more of pre-97 d&b are, almost counter-intuitively, reggaeton and baile funk. This is precisely <i>because</i> their rhythmic tricks are so simple and bare-bones, so to get any kind of interesting beat effect they have to do a lot of layering. The bits in baile funk where a freestyle beat and a sampled tribal drum are laid over the top of one another are very primitive ardkore....)
UK Garage retained/resurrected this complexity/mutational quality, but not usually in the beats: rather you'd get complex interplay b/w the vocals, the bassline, the chiming melody, the MCing, most fundamentally b/w song and track.
Dubstep has tended to downplay this in favour of emphasising just a few elements. The tracks continue UK Garage's relative rhythmic linearity, but obviously don't tend to share the songcraft or popwise technicolour complexity which tended to work against linearity in a typical UK Garage track. So, and I say this as non-judgmentally as possible, they resemble post-97 d&b slowed down more than anything else in my book. By which i mean the more mainstream dancefloor d&b rather than the breaks scene. But let's not fall into the trap of pretending that contemporary mainstream d&b isn't necessarily intricate rhythmically. Often it's very intricate. It's just that it rushes by in a mostly unchanging one bar loop that is too fast for the brain or body to compute as readily as it would at 135/140bpm. This is the problem with most d&b today: not rhythmic simplicity, but the combination of speed and one-bar-looping.
The way that current d&b can sidestep this and maintain its energy is just to mix through tracks very quickly: as per Jeff Mills style techno, the relative changelessness of the tunes themselves ceases to be an issue if yr moving b/w riddims so quickly. This happens a lot in dubstep sets too I've noticed (and i've been listening to quite a lot lately, but if it helps people to sleep at night if they think I'm talking entirely unsubstantiated bullshit then by all means go ahead). Where dubstep has a definite edge over contemporary D&B is that the more pronounced syncopation of the grooves means that the transitions between tracks are more noticable (and hence more enjoyable) from a rhythmic perspective. With a lot of contemporary d&b the distinction b/w tracks tends to be more heavily routed in the basslines or in mid-range riffs.
But I still think that one of the things that would make dubstep truly great is if there was more internal mutation going on - by adopting jungle's rhythmic dynamic a bit more fully, changing between beats, layering beats, moving from restrained beats to full-on beats. The tunes that move from halfstep to normal tempo kind of do this but there's so much more that could be done. I guess though the difference is that early jungle's beats were sampled and dubstep's are constructed from scratch, so it would probably require so much more effort to do this. On the other hand it's not just jungle that did this - listen to house/techno producers like Eulberg or Trentemoller and there's a surprising willingness to just keep changing the beat, to keep dancers on their toes constantly.
Sometimes when I'm listening to a dubstep set, I'll be settled into the groove and then I'll hear this new snare or kick come in and I'll think "yes! this tune is about to ascend to the next level!"... Only to realise that it's a new track. Which is great from a mixing perspective, but I want more dubstep to have that collision feeling you get from better track transitions.
I used to wish this with UK Garage too, but the song-factor made the unrequited desire less pressing. In fact perhaps it's precisely a certain fidelity to UK Garage which is preventing this from happening, I don't know...
