The Electronic Railroad: Station Dubstep
The past few days I’ve explored how the Modernism of the late 19th/early 20th century led to multiple innovations in music. The experimentation with song form, deviations from traditional melody and harmony, use of unconventional instruments, cultural appropriations and borrowing as a result of colonialism, industrialization, and the emergence of recorded sound all play fascinating roles in this story. The thread that I have followed has brought us down the path of electronic music, post WWII technological advents, and the emergence of electronic sound manipulation. Companies like Roland, Sony, Moog, and many others would take to commercializing these products for musicians to experiment with, and many other home brew laboratories would push the envelope even further. If we take a small glance back at how our journey has traversed this landscape, we can see a vital part of the puzzle that we have overlooked. As we enter the world of EDM, Drum and Bass, and Dubstep, there is an important stop to make at an island nation where much of it began.
Music that has grown out of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is vast. It is hard to find a popular genre of the modern era that is not touched in some way by this viscous practice of the European conquer and conquest of the Americas and island nations in the waters surrounding. People brought over in bondage brought great oral traditions and immensely powerful songs. These verses, driven by their suffering and fight for freedom have many evolutions. Some of which is the Drum and Bass, Reggae, and dance hall creations of the Jamaican islands. Sister Nancy is one of the iconic figures of these important turns in the digital music world, and much of her style was born out of the simplicity of a turn table and a mix-matched conglomeration of speakers in a community center.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962, Sister Nancy rebelled against her Christian roots, followed the dance halls and helped the DJ’s set up and perform their concerts for the communities. She put herself on stage around 1980 in her mid-teens. She was the first Jamaican DJ to tour internationally and was renowned for her conscious and spiritual lyric leanings and rolling vocals. Read more about her life from Mark Beaumont in his blog “Who is Sister Nancy? - the reggae artist sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye”. Her song “Bam-Bam” was famously and controversially used in a shoe commercial, after which her family helped her earn royalties. The music championed by Sister Nancy is part of a sound that focused on drum and bass, a dubbing method used to isolate rhythmic elements of popular recordings, with lyrical content often sung on top of the beats.
In fact, Sister Nancy helped make famous a local music tradition that long proceeded her. Since the 1950s, because of a lack of access to radio, locals would gather in dance halls and use a microphone to express the troubles of regional poverty and social issues. This practice, called “toasting” would then be dubbed onto mixes, advancing the scene. W0bble 5tep writes a great article about these origins in their post here. These origins make there way back to the UK in the 1960’, as immigrants from the Caribbean arrive and influence the night clubs and social life in small suburbs of Great Britain. By now, across the ocean, Robert Moog and Donald Bulcha are deep into the world of modulation, just waiting to collide with Drum and Bass to fuse into an exciting new realm of expression. Read more about them in yesterday’s post here.
Joseph L. Flatley writes in his 2012 article “Beyond lies the wub: a history of dubstep“ about how the small town of Croydon in South London was an important epicenter for some of the early Dubstep that would break onto the forefront by the 2000s. Bubbling up from small clubs and local scenes, this permutation of EDM that exsisted in the 1990s was pushed along by early contributors like a producer named Hatcha that discovered Skream and Benga. they would develop demos that would coalesce into a proto-dubstep by 2000. by 2002 the term “Dubstep” first appears in an XLR8R cover story on Horse Power Productions. This music uses much of the sampling techniques, sound manipulations, and digital processing used in electronica that is immersing the soundscape during this time period, and blends it with the dub stylings of the reggae influences brought along from across the ocean. Its most intriguing characteristics being the bending of frequencies, the definitive “b section drop” (a segment of the songs that create a dramatic shift in feel and tempo) and chest thumping bass from bending the lower end of the sound spectrum to sometimes deafening levels. Dubstep, like any other genre, has its bland and repetitive creators, but the sea of incredible artists that make amazing compositions with dynamic and captivating emotional statements is broad.
The artist that helped the public consciousness become aware of Dubstep as a mainstream music is often attributed to Sonny Moore, known as Skrillex. Like any popular figure, he has his trove of critiques, but his recognition for bringing the genre into the broad appeal is undeniable. Flatly writes, “In the 54th (2012) Grammy Awards, Skrillex was nominated for five awards, including Best New Artist and Best Short Form Music Video. Eventually, he went on to win awards for Best Remixed Recording, Best Dance Recording, and Best Dance / Electronica Album for Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” Moore was living illegally in a warehouse in London when he wrote Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites and used a immense level of content to emulate the reflection of youth and the remix culture we live in.
For myself, Dubstep has a special place in my heart. I had grown weary of the constant rehash of alternative rock by 2003. It was a genre that had morphed out of a long history from the 50s and before and had now burned my ears out post-grung. I had turned my head off to popular composition for almost a decade. When I heard Dubstep, the concept of using a wild array of twisted frequencies and bending the phsyics of sound waves into melody and rhythm opened my eyes and brought me back to life. I often feel like I have no business liking Dubstep. It seems to youthful for a kid from the 90s. It gets too much criticism from the grey-haired rockers that I perform with now. The classical world turns its nose up at it, and many people think its just composed of stolen material that other people created. As far as I’m concerned, its one of my favorite styles to lose myself in, and its origins and history are a fascinating tale to recall. Dubstep is just one of the many branches of music present in the early 21st century, and I for one, am excited to see what other branches come from it.
Here is Sister Nancy, singing the roots of our modern EDM to us with the classic “Bam Bam”