Pitch, Please!: Dubstep, please
Let me start by giving a disclaimer: I am not a music expert.
I don’t have a degree in any type of musical theory or study. I only go by information given to me secondhand and formulate an opinion based on that information. Feel free to call me out and give your opinion about what I am going to discuss. I appreciate feedback.
Dubstep is quite a unique form of music. It derives from the drum and bass and jungle music genres made popular in the UK and places emphasis on the sub-bass of the song.
I was with a friend of mine one day and she connected her iPod to her car speakers. I suspected that she was going to put on some Ke$ha or Bruno Mars, so I braced my ears for the worst. However, I wasn’t prepared for what was about to pollute my ears. She put on Skrillex. Skrillex!
If you follow my Twitter account or know me personally, you know how much I loathe and despise Skrillex’s music. After torturing me for about 15 minutes, we made it to McDonald’s and she made another mistake. I use the word mistake because I do believe she was misinformed. She told me that all she did today was make breakfast and listen to dubstep. I didn’t say anything. I just gave her a look. A look of pure disgust and venom.
She thought that incoherent noise was dubstep? Really? I wanted to hop across the table, shove my headphones deep into her eardrums and put on Magnetic Man’s “Crossover” or Skream’s “Midnight Request Line” and have her listen to that and re-evaluate her life. Why am I so adamant about this? Because at one time, I thought that all that grinding and distortion was dubstep. I was uneducated about how it really sounded. I blame the American market.
If Skrillex had called his music electronic dance music (EDM) like he should be, I wouldn’t have to watch all the people around me flailing around ridiculously to “Bangarang.” Unlike dubstep, in which sub-bass is key, Skrillex’s “brostep” places more emphasis on ratty high frequency samples and oscillators. Toss in a few hip-hop vocal samples and you have pretty much any Skrillex song. This is what people equate to the whole “transformers having sex” metaphor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I hate the guy for doing what he is doing. I just hate the fact that whenever you say dubstep, your train of thought goes to transformers having sex (which is impossible I might add).
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As somebody who writes about electronic dance music on a daily basis for a well known music website i feel the need to correct you on a couple of things. First of all Skrillex (aka Sonny Moore) has never called himself a dubstep artist. He has always openly admitted that some of his music is dubstep and but most of it falls into other genres. He is what is called a multi-genre artist. The dubstep songs that he has made are in fact dubstep songs. You, me or anyone else really are not really to declare that his songs are not dubstep. His songs that have been classified as dubstep are dubstep because they fall in the 140 BPM range and have the traditional structure of the dubstep genre. Whether or not you like it or not is up to you but if I were you I would remember that all genres of music undergo evolve over time and American dubstep artists are evolving the music. There is no need to get upset about it.
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