Brostep's bass-blasts dissected!

 Going Hard: Bassweight, Sonic Warfare, & the 'Brostep" Aesthetic", by Mike D’Errico of UCLA, offers an academic analysis of the "wobble continuum" and its assaultive eruptions of tremolo-bass,  deploying concepts like digital maximalism, hypermasculinity, and Julian Henriques notion of "sonic dominance.":

'“Hardness” is the overriding affect here; compressed, gated kick and snare drum samples combine with coagulated, “overproduced” basslines made up of multiple oscillators vibrating at broad frequency ranges, colonizing the soundscape by filling every chasm of the frequency spectrum. The music—and the media forms with which it has become entwined—has served as the affective catalyst and effective backdrop for the emergence of an unabashedly assertive, physically domineering, and adrenaline-addicted “bro” culture. '

It's the first in a series of brostep-dedicated essays at Sounding Out, apparently, with others to come from Christina Giacona, and series editor Justin D Burton.

Interesting, precisely-described stuff from D'Errico, although the reflexive revulsion from masculinist aesthetics and videogame-generation ADD-OD power trips is a bit by-the-book academia. As well ast the "Maximal Nation" piece  he might want to check out the Hardcore Continuum series essay "Masculine Pressure", on gladiatorial and militaristic imagery in jungle, dubstep and grime -if not quite a defence or apologia, certainly an explanation.


postscript (1/24/14): Robin James at It's Her Factory adds her thoughts on the topic of "Bro-gemony & dubstep":

"Whereas industrial capitalism required conformity (mass production = standardization), neoliberal capitalism requires distortion. And it requires this distortion from everyone, not just bros, men, or masculine subjects. The rewards for that noisemaking are unevenly distributed so that patriarchy wins, but everyone is required to max out, to scream as loud and as long as possible....

"The hardcore distortion Mike discusses certainly does the work of patriarchy, but as a generalized ideal not limited to “masculinity,” at least as traditionally conceived as a quality attributed to “men.” Distortion is the general means of production. And in this model, instead of thinking about masculinity as an attribute of individual people, it’s more helpful to think of patriarchy as an attribute of the overall mix. Young-Girls and Spring Breakers can central players in bro culture. "

She analogises from noise/rowdiness as disruption (an outdated notion of insubordination, breaking free, unconstraint, insurrection) to the neolib/accelerationist celebration of the innovator as disruptor:

"This Bro is patriarchy as corporate ‘person’ who wants each individual to be entrepreneurial–to take risks, to ‘disrupt’–because these individual ventures generate the dynamism on which the corporate bro feeds. This Bro is cool with whatevs–drugs, sex, even letting girls Lean In and being a little bromancy and gay himself. Excess isn’t just tolerated; the Bro expects and demands excess from individuals, because that’s what keeps him going."

Her final provocation: "An alternative to Bro-gemony might look like something altogether uncool, inflexible, and reactionary... When Bro-capitalism demands that we make lots of noise, that we distort ourselves to the max, things like cleanliness and fastidiousness function counter-culturally, maybe…"

That reminded me a bit of my celebration of Vampire Weekend as Appollonian - dainty not Dionysian

But the hipper to be square move has a long history of course - anti-rockism, the Style Council, the perennial embrace of E-Z listening / muzak / exotica  (from Jerry Dammers to Lanza's Elevator Music to, well, vaporwave).

the filth and the fury

Joe Muggs defends brostep and heavy metal wobble

I heartily concur

Never understood why people got bothered by people taking their shirts off, getting rowdy, (b)rocking out

It's a rave

Meant to be sweaty, crazy, out of control

It's rave music

Meant to be mad-noise, bludgeoning, full-spectrum dominance of the sensorium, verging on an endurance test

Strange how these battle lines endlessly reconstitute themselves...

that Claire Morgan Jones piece is from over 20 years ago, and it's the same syndrome... the "new heavy metal" argument, the recoiling from "boys bass and bother"

as discussed in greater depth in my Masculine Pressure essay from 2009,  an early adopter of the  pro-bro stance...

further to my point here about dubstep pre-2007 lacking a core... 

listening again to the famous super-influential Dubstep Wars Breezeblock All-Stars session that Mary Ann Hobbs hosted in late 2006, I heard scene-godfather Hatcha utter these words about FWD>> and the genesis of dubstep over the preceding six years:

"The music we were playing at the FWD nights didn't really have a name. But it had a lot of sounds from all kinds of music in it. Every producer really is different. One'll be more into his reggae sound, one'll be more into his break-y sound, one'll be more into his techno-y sound... So you can't really pinpoint this sound. But we just call this whole little community of music 'dubstep'."

So that's September 2006. But within a year, this scene/sound that lacked a hard core had formed one; a hardcore emerged within it, a defined style, and with it came a hardcore mentality.

It's the reverse of what happens usually with music, which is that the centre doesn't hold, it fragments into substyles and fusion-izes with adjacent genres. It matures -- grows more sophisticated and refined. Gets genteel and a bit gutless, and in the process loses the massive, which is often the young audience.

 But as the last five years have shown, the total opposite happened with dubstep.

Dubstep grew down.

Within what had hitherto been a quasi-genre, a centripetal scenius logic takes over.  A linearity assembled itself and drove the genre through half-step, into wobble, into brostep / mid-range "metalla-purge". The music got less intelligent and varied, more lumpen and monolithic. It literally regressed, going from a elders sound for 90s veterans and ex-junglists to a noise for boys. 

Completely back to front from how things usually go with a genre!

Fascinating, eh! So how come? 

An influx of historical ignorants, new recruits insufficently schooled in the various old skool roots of D-step?  That the DJs start to respond to, in terms of what tunes go over in the big room context at peak hour, in terms of not just their selection but their own production?

A knock-on of the anti-smoking-in-club laws, causing people to embrace pills because they couldn't get away with a sly spliff anymore? 

Or is it just the visceral, debasing power of those mid-range, chainsaw, abject-slurry basslines?

further to the previous

this wobble anthem on a label (Wicky Lindows) hailed by Leaving Earth reminded me of this movie I once saw on TV -- can't remember the title (perhaps an East European cinema buff can identify it ) but some scenes from it have always stuck in my memory. Czech,  possibly...  made in the Nineties but set in the Fifties or early Sixties -- there's a school and this rebellious boy, who's into rock'n'roll and all things American, and at some point he manages to take over the school tannoy system, i think ... and declaims a bunch of insurrectionary nonsense, including the rallying cry "LONG LIVE THE IDIOT".

and from one black sheep of the postrave family to another....

Leaving Earth with a top 10 list of Wobble Records

and he's not talking about circa-2006-halfstep-wobble-when-it-was-good

he's talking filthstep, grosstep, abjectionstep, vomstep

his  first choice for the top 10 "immortal wobble objects for posterity" =

Leaving Earth's mysterious Taninian opines, persuasively:

"The wobble aesthetic now seem to be fusing with electro house, to form a new all purpose rave music, much like punk rawness/intensity eventually ended up as a part of a wider “real rock” sensibility in the eighties. It’s all about the Skrillex/ Deadmau5-axis, of course, and while Deadmau5 doesn’t seem all that exciting to me, Skrillex is actually pretty good. Sure, he might not have that many tricks up his sleeve so far....  but he’s nevertheless really good at using wobbles potential for catchiness and dynamics, redefining it to meet his own ends. It would be tempting to go all the way and see him as some sort of, I dunno, dubstep's Sex Pistols, but ... perhaps something like Metallica is probably a better comparison."

At the MTV Movie Awards the other night, the warm-up deejay Martin Solveig was dropping nonstop wobble (the Skrillexy maximalist wibble-tendril type, rather than Stenchman-style diarrhea-step, but still)  to the assembled celebritati and industry people.


Then, in that comedy skit taking the piss out of Emma Stone before she got her "Trailblazer" Award, where the mirth-premise was that in real life she's a horrible arrogant unsweetheart, one of the faux-nasty comments from Mila Kunis was "Emma says she invented dubstep"

So it really has crossed over.

Or at least it will have done, completely, when Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something similar replaces the rockor mortis of moments like Johnny Depp guest riffing with the Black Keys.

Back to the Leaving Earth list--which inexplicably is unaccompanied by YouTubes, I expect he expects you to search out and buy these records -- reading it I found myself wondering whether the actual tunes could possibly live up to descriptions such as these:

"the EP [Tomba's Brace For Impact] excels at the 'grunt-step” wobble variety, like a horde of towering, Godzilla-sized pig-robots marching through a nocturnal megapolis, crushing everything in their way while puking out cascades of green ooze through writhing hydraulic cyber-snouts"

It does actually


Another of Leaving Earth's choices: Doctor P's "Gargoyles"

All this metal-ic grotesquerie-imagery reminds me of that notion I mooted a few years back: wobblestep (d)evolving towards a kind of slowed-down gabba...

so maybe the dungeon style of dubstep is the "intelligent"/ambient/atmospheric version of that -- equivalent to gloomcore? 

Macabre Unit as a label name -- how gloomcore is that?


more from the Leaving Earth list: