Most people in music journalism that I read seem to be over dubstep.  Carles at Hipster Runoff has been taking the piss out of it for a while now.  Back in Atlanta, friends who were loyal to the genre now lament that entire fraternities show up to the clubs seeking only the dubbiest of steps. Even some of the genres own practitioners are acknowledging the backlash, in this interview from January Rusko, the king of “face-melting” dubstep, talks brostep and when bass goes too far:

Further, one of the innovators of dubstep, Zomby, himself coined the term post-dubstep and his music has never quite returned to the signature dubstep sound that he helped pioneer back in 2007/8 (I write all about him for QRO mag here).

Just when it seemed that everybody and their brother was hating on dubstep…my brother wrote this hilarious blog post hating on dubstep.  Here’s just a taste,

“My friend was in rehab for a long time and he told me that people would inhale whatever products they could, shoe polish, paint, glue and it would give them the sensation of the “Wah Wahs”  where they would hear “wahwahwahwahwah” ringing in their head for a minute or two.  Being at a dub step show I think destroys your brain in a similar way.”

Call it a coincidence (or “ironic” in the Alanis Morisette way) that shortly after reading my brother’s post @DubstepNYC started following me on twitter.  I don’t have a ton of followers, about 90, so I thought that this was pretty cool, kind of a recognition in a way despite how pathetically narcissistic it is to get excited by a new follower on twitter.  

Not to go too far off subject, but a Pitchfork article about Minneapolis duo, Elite Gymnastics speaks directly to this point by drawing a distinction between internet use that is narcissistic - twitter/tumblr - and internet use that builds community - message boards.  I’ll admit that in the last year or so I’ve made a shift to the narcissistic forms, almost totally abandoning message boards and only occasionally engaging in discussions via comment sections on articles or videos.  Perhaps my shift is a product of my re-immersion in academia.  The idea being that in class I get enough opportunity to engage in dialogue that I no longer feel the need to seek out anonymous people on a message board.  Also, academic culture values creation of original scholarship, not saying that I’m doing that by keeping up a tumblr, but it is writing practice in one form or another.

Anyways! Shortly after being followed by @DubstepNYC, I get a mention from @djwhatt:

@PoMoRadio Hope u enjoy my 79min Audio & Video “DIFF” DubStep Mashup Album @ freshnewtracks.com/2011/08/23/dos…let me know ;-)

I click the link and sure enough someone named DOSVEC has made a 79 minute Dubstep Mashup mixtape complete with music videos from the vocal tracks spliced together.  This is a lot to take in, and it’s clear that a lot of time (6 months) has been put into its production.  While the opening track or two seem a little uneven in the mix, things quickly settle into a really listenable groove, something that can’t be said for a lot of dubstep. Essentially this guy is doing a dubstep Girl Talk album with fewer total tracks per minute.  Now it’s not fair to compare the this mixtape with the last 3 Girl Talk albums - Night Ripper, Feed the Animals, All Day - when he hit his stride and cleared out the glitch that crowded his first two albums (and made the first one borderline unlistenable).  This mixtape instead is more straight forward, with most tracks containing one song’s vocals on top of one dubstep track with some original dubstep production flourishes added to hip hop beats as well.  In this way its actually closer to a Hood Internet mixtape, similarly co-opting pop music like Paramore and Glee Cast recordings to a greater extent than we find on Girl Talk albums (save the incredible Kelly Clarkson/Nine Inch Nails mashup on Feed the Animals).

At the end of the tape, I’ve gotta say that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought that I would.  At times the bass gets monotonous, I for one am just not interested in listening to a stuttered snare and motorcycle-rev bass for an hour and a half straight.  The pop of the track selection though makes the tape work, and the smoothness of the transitions makes it hard to turn off.  From Kanye’s Power as an opener to Big Sean near the end, the album covers about 18 months of pop music reimagined through the lens of that crazy post-apocalyptic rave at the end of the second matrix movie.

While I don’t have enough time to do a track-by-track breakdown of the tape, and unfortunately the tape is only available as a streaming soundcloud or vimeo, I will point out a few highlights.  The first is at 30:43 mark when some throwback jungle/trance sounds are introduced that just feel much more vital to me today than hackneyed bass synths. The second is when a dubstep remix of “Look at Me Now” is blended into Birdman and Lil’ Wayne’s “Stuntin Like my Daddy,” over the “Big Pimpin” beat.  All three of these songs deserve to make the top 200 hip hop songs of all time list, so this works for me.  There’s also a dubstep “Gucci Gucci” by Kreyashawn.  I’m surprised how few remixes there are to this song despite its popularity, so I was glad to see it on here.

There’s definitely more to be discovered though, so take a look/listen for yourself and decide where you and dubstep stand today.