Dubstep

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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
http://www.nme.com/news/muse/65137

Muse have revealed that they were inspired by Skrillex for their forthcoming album 'The 2nd Law'.

"We went to see Skrillex in Camden around October," he says. "We went, 'Fuck, it's so heavy,' loved it. I was like a full metal gig, they had circles of death, people were moshing, I hadn't seen a reaction like that to electronic music before. We took inspiration and came up with 'The 2nd Law: Unsustainable'."

"Some of that hard dubstep and brostep coming from America, is capturing the imagination," singer Matt Bellamy adds. "The moshpit has moved from guitars and gone towards the laptop, so with that song we're trying to see if we can challenge the laptop. We created something that was dubsteppy but we wanted to see if we could do it with real instruments. We wanted to ask, 'Can rock bands compete with what these guys are doing?'"
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Sectionfive

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
"Some of that hard dubstep and brostep coming from America, is capturing the money," singer Matt Bellamy adds. "The $$$$ has moved from guitars and gone towards the laptop, so with that song we're trying to see if we can challenge the laptop.
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etc
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Be fair, the money is 'young people in the masses', and that motivates every decision of these rock bands these days. They hate the fact that their format is so unnecessary, and that they lose to seemingly 'untalented' individuals in rap or electronics so EASILY now.

Because really, who the hell my age still wants to hear someone badly marry Jeff Buckley to Queen is beyond me.
 
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daddek

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
I agree though, that's the other extreme of the see-saw for me! But what I'm getting at, someone has to constantly EXPAND the definitions. You can make a genre really really fucking huge. Like, nobody thinks all techno sounds alike right? Granted, there are weird sort of definitions of what techno is, but you can really make it fit your needs, likewise with house. So, why couldn't people in dubstep keep thinking about expanding dubstep, instead of getting worried about "Oh, am I going to be the 'dubstep' guy for the rest of my life? Will people just say 'Oh, there goes so-and-so, the dubstep guy. Look at him go.'."

I'm saying you should not fall into the pit of orthodoxy for orthodoxy's sake, because we all know fucking nothing goes on in that mindstate, but we shouldn't feel a need to distance and isolate ourselves from the scene we created. I'm one to talk, I haven't even paid attention to anything remotely dubstep related in maybe half a year, but I'm not going to let it go just because there's this big "PROBLEM" of a different genre called dubstep. Just like if I was really into house, I'm not going to say "Well, I can't pretend I'm in house when everyone thinks you need to sound like David Guetta all the fucking time".
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hip hop and house are like meta-genres. they are foundational, elemental. So they are futureproof. dubstep was always a tributary, a slip stream. it doesnt deserve the kind of lifelong dedication you're taling about it, the form itself is just too transitory. I would say the same of d&b, its life cycle is used, and it is rotting away.

I think you can only make a case for people being obligated toward a scene, if they have built a career on being standard bearers of that scene, if they deliberately made the genre indivisible from their music and identity. Then your arguments come into play.

But many of the guys who left dubstep were attempting to disassociate themselves from the v beginning. They are relieved to be free of a genre they saw as someone else's, and in many cases are creating better music now. i cant think of single good reason why they should pretend to identify themselves as dubstep.
 
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SecondLine

Well-known member
daddek said:
hip hop and house are like meta-genres. they are foundational, elemental. So they are futureproof. dubstep was always a tributary, a slip stream. it doesnt deserve the kind of lifelong dedication you're taling about it, the form itself is just too transitory. I would say the same of d&b, its life cycle is used, and it is rotting away.

I think you can only make a case for people being obligated toward a scene, if they have built a career on being standard bearers of that scene, if they deliberately made the genre indivisible from their music and identity. Then your arguments come into play.

But many of the guys who left dubstep were attempting to disassociate themselves from the v beginning. They are relieved to be free of a genre they saw as someone else's, and in many cases are creating better music now. i cant think of single good reason why they should pretend to identify themselves as dubstep.
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well said. although I do wonder sometimes - and I love house music, much more than any 'nuum' genre at this point - about that fundamental difference: with jungle, garage, dubstep whatever you always have this kind of self-destructive tendency to break down the form and move outside of it, which makes these sounds unstable & likely to self-cannibalise pretty quickly. Whereas with house, it's almost like people can't (or don't want to) imagine a 'world outside' the form.

The tiny mark fisher on my shoulder is whispering that that says something unfavourable about the cultural (and also political) imagination of a scene in thrall to house. 'There is no alternative' etc. etc.
 
benjybars

benjybars

village elder.
anyone go to FWD 11th birthday??

Kode9's 2007 set was ridiculous... Plasticman's 2004 set was sick as well. good night.


Also, if you're interested in this sort of thing, Youngsta's most recent Rinse set is pretty fucking decent.. much more energy than usual.. a few 4x4 bits even! Second hour is old-skool bits :) http://www.mediafire.com/?bea1e8e179qul8y


off to System tonight. anyone else? or am i the only one on here who still goes to dubstep nights :slanted:
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
@daddek; While I get that, riddle me this... garage is a sub-genre of house, no? and when dubstep was in it's formulative ages, a lot of the basis of this were people jacking ideas from jungle, dub techno & other outside fields, and forcing them into garage's contexts in order to try and form a balance. Not always with the result of a 'proper' song for garage's typical requirements, but enough so that people liked the ideas, and then they were able to continue building on that, until people continued bringing influences from more and more fields.

I guess a good example of this would be in rap, there's the whole hyphy/post-hyphy/jerk/ratchet thing going on. There's a lot less outside influences perhaps, but there's a noteworthy attempt to constantly redefine this sound with whatever you can grab. I mean, they were sampling Omni Trio on the fucking Tyga LP. A drum & bass/rap crossover was obviously never going to work according to your parameters, so the fact that it's become sample-fodder FOR hip-hop just as any soul/funk record would 20 years ago seems no big shock. Yet at the same time, it's a notion enough that, if expanded, could result in it's own little micro-event. Imagine, 20 or so years late, Americans reinventing hardcore/rave through a modern hip-hop filter. But in these sub-genres, you don't get that because the idea is once you get inspired by something new... Don't try to draw from it, JUST GO THAT WAY.
 
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daddek

Well-known member
Your inference seems to be that by allowing genre-commitments to be transitory, one is necessarily promoting the creation of new subgenres. To me that seems false. I don't see guys leaving dubstep in pursuit of new subgenres with which to sell themselves.. new axis are occurring obv (swamp/NS/hessle) but this is almost in spite of group determination to spurn a new subgenre. For now; obv these open spaces always become marketed into genres eventually. Yet acts like mount kimbie and darkstar seem wholly resolved to inhabit non-scenius, unattached artist space. Whether that's a weakness, depends on your allegiance to nuum values. But they were working on the periphery anyway.

I didnt fully grasp the examples tbh.. re the pre-dubstep/grime, post ukg thing, firstly its worth stating that few to none of the grime/OG dubstep guys came from 'house', and not all came from ukg. Moreover, they weren't trying to keep alive the idea of uk garage, once it felt dead, they were eager to ditch it. And they weren't jacking ideas from jungle or techno, they were raised within those musics and often directly attached to them in their nascent careers. They were happy to ditch these old forms, including garage, because a new blooded, potential laden, unformed territory opened up.. one that appealed to the same principles that originally drew them to the forms that they were now abandoning. I think it works as a counter example to the genre-attachment your advocating tbh.

maybe this is just an ungoing semantic problem - we have no useful words for describing the ongoing macro genre this has all been part of, other than the academic & eyesore term of 'nuum'. If we had one, it would be easier to describe these movements not as partitions but as currents within a stream.

perhaps the real issue is, do you object to artists to leaving macro scenes altogether? eg are hiphop artists allowed to move out of hiphop, nuum artists leave nuum. And if it's undisciplined for them to switch lanes, are they allowed to detach from scene connections altogether, to become free operators? Or is that innately narcissistic and gutless of them.

It's also worth stating that prior to becoming "recording artists", most people are attached to a shifting multitude of scenes, in their listening, social attachments, and their early musical attempts. I'm sure you don't consider yourself to be a identified by one genre for life. Prior to getting recognition, bedroom producers will most often have a spectrum of genre attempts sitting on their hard drive. Yet once their first big tune is picked up by a scene dj, they become crystallized within that scene. The subsequent narrative around their career will always refer to this scene as "where they come from". This narrative & expectation, on analysis, can be quite spurious, based on a chance sequence of events. Unsurprising that artists caught up in this narrative, eventually want to step out of it.
For me, the legitimacy of that effort partly rests on how much they've exploited that narrative. I half feel that careerists deserve to be stuck in a genre they've milked.
 
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gremino

Moster Sirphine
daddek said:
hip hop and house are like meta-genres. they are foundational, elemental. So they are futureproof. dubstep was always a tributary, a slip stream. it doesnt deserve the kind of lifelong dedication you're taling about it, the form itself is just too transitory. I would say the same of d&b, its life cycle is used, and it is rotting away.
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i think you can't compare dubstep/dnb to house/hiphop, as they're part of 'nuum. it's the 'nuum that is foundational and elemental, and short-living genres are just it's characteristics. 'nuum's genres perhaps doesn't deserve lifelong dedication, but it itself deserves and gets it.
 
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daddek

Well-known member
gremino said:
i think you can't compare dubstep/dnb to house/hiphop, as they're part of 'nuum. it's the 'nuum that is foundational and elemental, and short-living genres are just it's characteristics. 'nuum's genres perhaps doesn't deserve lifelong dedication, but it itself deserves and gets it.
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this is a re-clarification of the passage you quoted right
 
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gremino

Moster Sirphine
^ yeah, might be that i'm really not saying anything new! but it seemed like you took dubstep out of it's context, which is 'nuum. i think it's unfair to compare single hc continuum genres to "elemental" genres like hiphop. same aplies to juke and footwork, as they're part of the ghetto house continuum.
 
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