It's Gonna Get Louder: a Brief Introduction To Dubstep

December 06, 2011

My boyfriend is a musician. This first part is crucial. He's well-versed in a variety of "genres", and very much in tune with new trends. If it hadn't been for him forcing me to listen to DJ Fresh's Louder, I'd probably still be in the dark about Dubstep. I listened to it for the first time only a few months ago. If someone would have asked me to define it back then, I would have resorted to lines like, "It sounds like dance music" or "It's order giving way to controlled chaos." In retrospect, neither of those explanations is wrong, but nor are they precise enough to do Dubstep justice.

AllMusic defines Dubstep as, "Tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals." "Tightly coiled" suggests the "tension" I picked up on during my first listen. The real defining characteristic of Dubstep, however, is the bass drop. The much softer introduction of the song tends to either fade away or end abruptly. Percussion freezes momentarily, and loud bass overwhelms everything else. It really is a controlled kind of chaos though. The manipulated energy of the bass gives way to what is known as the outro, which brings a softening of the music once again.

Many popular tracks have been converted into Dubstep, a sign that it's on the rise. It got its start as "garage music" in South London in the late 1990s, but has sense become popular worldwide. A range of additional techniques set different Dubstep pieces apart from one another. There's quite a bit of variety in the budding genre.

Explore some of the links below to get a feel for the music.

• A List of DJs
• A Dubstep rendition of Muse's Knights of Cydonia
• A Dubstep Rendition of Adele's Someone Like You
• Dubstepped Tetris Theme Song
• Dubstepped Song of Storms

And create your own Dubstep here.

Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Amanda W.
North Independence Branch