OK
Well I've listened really carefully to what folk have said on this thread; got hold of some of the tunes people were recommending and I went to DMZ last night.
The first thing to say is that, yes, as everyone has argued, dubstep is transformed when played on a massive sound system. The effect is more oceanic, enveloping and seductive than punitive. But probably even more important than the sub-bass materialism was the role of the crowd as an intensifier. The vibe was incredibly positive; in fact, I don't think I've been in a club where the atmosphere was so friendly, where the crowd was so mixed (in terms of race, gender, class, nationality) since the heady daze of rave. You're left thinking, 'what is it in a sound that is, on the face of it, so unremitting, so forbidding and austere, that produces such positive affect?' Partly it's bass addiction, as the DMZ mc kept saying - shout to all the bass zombies out there. (The only problem was that it was so crowded, so it was difficult to find a space to dance --- even then though, people were incredibly polite and didn't just push on through as is normal in most London spaces.)
It's clear, as ppl were saying upthread, that Loefah, Kode 9, Digital Mystikz are a world away from the flat and one-dimensional sound I was trashing. (Kode's spaghetti dubstep sound is particularly catchy: I've had Kingstown and Nine Samurai in my head all day....)
All that said, I don't think what I was saying before (viz. about vocals) is invalid. It fact, hearing that massive bass sound only made me wonder about how much more intense things would get if there were some songs and vocals. Imagine that level of bass, with reverbed and panned vocals....
Blackdown, I totally take your point about where producers are to get the vocals from. Burial's solution - and this is to reinforce Marcus' point above that it's not as if Burial is 'really' dub either - seems to be to use vocals to imply a song. Often, it is
as if he's dubbed the track....
I think pursuing the grime thing would be a dead end (and not only in the sense that the MCs would shoot you
). Seems to me clear that what went wrong with grime was that it was two 'yangs'; ultra-abstract sound plus shouty male aggression. That's why, even though, on the face of it, the DMZ sound ought to be very male, it's actually feminized by comparison with what it came from - simply because one of the yang elements has been removed. But that's created a space for a new feminine 'yin' element - it would be amazing if there was the equivalent of Roisin Murphy on the dubstep scene... Or perhaps what the scene is waiting for is its version of Adamski/Seal...
It's obvious from the vibe last night though that if the future is incubating anywhere atm, it's in dubstep. But the scene shouldn't be frightened of succeeding.... There's nothing wrong with having some relationship to pop...
