I think that's less and less the case. Especially as it's become harder to smoke weed in UK clubs.Think the drug thing is important here. Ecstacy use is openly frowned upon in Dubstep.
I think that's less and less the case. Especially as it's become harder to smoke weed in UK clubs.
yeah i was on about all the boring samey samey half step bangin "rollers" i hear out at dubstep parties (i won't be attending in the near future). raw physicality blah blah... don't mean shit if there's no humanity in it.
Too many people in this thread are getting something confused that is quite important i think:
Music does not have to have SOUL to evoke emotions. You can get the most dry, clicky piece of music that sounds completely inhuman, and if it's good enough it will still make you feel something. Early techno is great at doing this - there's an ambiguity about what the producer themselves is feeling, but it can still make you feel alot.
It's a fallacy to say that music has to have recognisable emotional signifiers in order for it to be emotional.
And on dubstep not being dance music - I don't even think you have to go to a club to understand that good dubstep is great dance music. For me it's all about the tension in the beats between the 140bpm pace and all the other tempos that run through the music cos of the half step or whatever unusual rhythm is being used. It's not obvious dance music like digitalism or something, but it's very much danceable.
No, in that this thread is full of people who appear to know pretty much fuck all about dubstep making general pronouncements about the nature or state of said genre.the subject matters which you allude to are inherently a part of the culture which rap is borne of. so... are you saying the absence of sex is an essential characteristic of dubstep?
Hang on how do I get lambasted (rightly) for using "organic"... but Zhao gets away with endless pontificating on "humanity" in music... and fetishisation of ethnic "other" music as so earthy and natural and human and blah de blah blah... which is equally bullshit if not more so and for identical reasons- its not the sound of sounds which is the problem, but the delivery system, the social and economic context etc. If you attempt to find some raw unmediated dance music of sex and earthy passion, all you can find is the image of such a thing, which just like the image of inhuman dance music is just that AN IMAGE. If there is any "outside" left (and I reckon there isn't) then it would be at the level of unrecorded immediate music between you and others as musicians (maybe again).
If anything I sense a way out of the impasse through the embracing of entirely post-human, the building of a subject which is suitable for the media-capital environment. Human-as-becoming, not as falsely naturalised end-point. In an anti-Marxist sense perhaps alienation and an environment of technocratic affect is the very point of the human... digressing here into bollocks...
For me the entire point of music is finding new ways of hearing, new methods of comprehension.
Drugs wise most people booze/weed for dubstep. Dancing? A lolloping from left to right in a dub reggae fashion for the slothful, for the more energetic a doubletime brok-out spazfest.
And Nomadologist- you're welcome to derail my BEAUTIFUL thread, but please more detail...
yeh as well as Sarah running Ammunition and Letty doing Redstar, Platform 1, Dubpressure with Unlikely and Clandestine - two of the most important people in the scene for sure
in the music itself though, very little. Vaccine brings something very different mind
Well, I don't exactly agree with Zhao, but I understand what he's getting at. Aesthetically I have no problem with the "inhuman" or even what Dubstep is trying to do, I just don't think they quite get there.
While I like your ideas here about finding a way out of the impasse, I doubt such an insular, scene-driven genre is capable of performing this herculean task.
In purely abstract sonic terms, which always boil down to subjective taste/preference, I prefer beats that make me want to dance. Dubstep beats often make me want to take migraine medication and/or smash my head against a wall. This could be a problem with me, not the music.
its not really trying to do that, I don't think. Pinch is quite technical and he obviously inherits that from his interests in minimal... but lots of other producers use sampled analogue "real" sounds.
No of course that would be absurd...
Are you listening to the doubletime percussion? That and the interactions with modulating bass are where the danceability is at basically. A lot of dubstep is actually quite shit and slothful and angers me. But the good stuff has a kind of frenetic wonkiness to it which is highly physically compulsive... (tho in actuality I'm "off" dancing at the moment like a sick kid "off" games...)
Actually I was going to say that I think it might be helpful sometimes to go back and listen to dubstep circa 2005 to understand what it is doing at the moment, and maybe what's in danger of being lost.Oh god not back to IDM again!
Maybe the insiders here are listening to it (Dusbtep) through a prism of 2 step garage. That probably explains why we hear it in the same sense (ie- as funky shit)...
Isn't Juakali who does vocals on the Pinch record from New York?Sorry.
I think it just loses something in cross-cultural translation, to be honest. That shit just don't jibe over here. (Maybe because I'm so much more immersed in disco and hip-hop?)Don't really know why, we have tons of jamaicans and reggae people who do dub and stuff...