2007 was always going to be a toughie for dubstep. The hefty
'Pitchforking' dished out to the Burial, Skream and Kode9 full-lengths last year, its dominance of Radio 1's Mary Anne Hobbs
show and an 8-page Primer feature in high-brow music rag
The Wire all pointed towards the acceptance of dubstep into a canon of "respectable" electronic music forms. Uh oh. ALARM BELLS, non!?! Lurch further into the critical mainstream and you risk ending up as go-to for Volvo ad-men everywhere (oh..wait...Stephen Merritt got there
first). This is basically what happened to
Moby, if you discount the fact that Moby decided to skip the whole 'critical respectability' stage completely (though I'm sure this troubles him rarely as he cuddles his lovely big bags of money and slurps chai from the bosoms of nubile young vegans). Alternatively, go the other way and stroke the the collective chin of fans of "serious music" and you might do what is affectionately termed
'a minimal', and retreat embarassingly up into the big smelly echo chamber of your own bum.
So, a road fraught with danger then. But in 2007 dubstep has proven that growth and creativity are not incompatible with (relative) commercial success, and that a lot more than that old wibble-wobble can stand under dubstep's umbrella. The
Planet Mu,
Tectonic and
Skull Disco camps have continued to move with some success into dubstep's leftfield, with artists like
Pinch,
Neil Landstrumm,
Boxcutter,
2562 and
Shackleton/
Appleblim variously infusing their work with the super-minimalism of classic
Basic Channel, the beardy acid of
AFX/Rephlex and the ultra-percussive backbone of African and Asian musics.
Villalobos' devastating 18-minute rework of
Shackleton's Blood On My Hands stands as the crowning achievement of this new reductionist strain - not dubstep
per se, but crucial in its application of minimal's narcotic pulse to the foreboding bass drops and reverbed snares of the foreboding Shackleton original. This cross-fertilisation of "higher" electronic genres, rather than resulting in an offputting and self-reverential intellectual circle jerk, has in fact opened up the exciting possibility of a world where the MDMA-gobbling hordes of Ibiza's
DC-10 are just as likely to lap up the latest dubplate cooked up in a Bristolian bedroom as they are the new
M-nus 12" Hawtin sneezed onto his petri dish like a minimal
Heston Blumenthal.
Other artists have instead found routes to dubstep's future in its past. Instead of seeking radical convergences with other forms, they have instead chosen to rexamine, re-emphasise and mutate its own foundations in the search for new sounds. Typically, this has taken the form of either a focus on the 'Dub' or a focus on the 'Step'. Pivotal to the reawakening of the dub within dubstep was
Soul Jazz's 'Box of Dub' collection that they put out at the beginning of the summer. By throwing its considerable critical weight behind a dubstep compilation so heavily informed by original JA pioneers like Tubby and Prince Jammy and UK heroes like Mad Professor, On-U Sound and Scientist, Soul Jazz repositioned dub as central to the evolution of dubstep and removed the prospect that it would come to have only a spectral presence within the scene. Next month's release of 'Box of Dub 2' can only confirm dubstep's resurgence, and given what an absolute winner it is, it would seem to churlish to grumble.
Download: Pinch ft. Rudey Lee - Step To It [from Box of Dub 2, Soul Jazz, 2007]
Download: Cotti - Tamil Dub [from Box of Dub 2, Soul Jazz, 2007]
Preorder: Box of Dub 2 from Sounds of the Universe
In terms of the 'Step', things are set to get interesting with the long-awaited arrival of Benga & Coki's
'Night', the thirtieth release on
Tempa. With the support of grime wunderkids
Boy Better Know, it tore up Napa over the summer, and signalled (about time) a new allegiance between the dubstep and grime/bassline scenes at a time when dubstep was perhaps closer than ever to losing the streets that gave birth to it. This could be the first release since
'Midnight Request Line' to to crossover into HMV territory and it wouldn't surprise me if the seemingly constant push back of its drop date has something to do with major distributors or labels sniffing around. This might not be entirely unrelated to the expectation that UK urban, bass-led music is soon to storm the Top 40 again, doing properly what grime failed to do a couple of years ago, but UK garage succeeded at doing around the turn of the millennium - breaching the walls of commercial clubbing and radio. Now I'm not saying that tunes like 'Night' will be at the front of this - leave that to niche/bassline - but there will undoubtedly be some sort of interplay between dubstep and bassline around the fringes of the explosion, much in the same way that the poppy 2-step of Sweet Female Attitude and Shanks & Bigfoot opened doors for the proto-grime of More Fire Crew or Pay As U Go Cartel. So what then? Will dubstep be forced to throw its hat into the commercial ring, or will it shy away from success, rejecting the triumphs (or, indeed, artistic nadir - who will be the garage clown-in-chief this time, given that
DJ Pied Piper hopefully fucked off back to Hamelin?) of its musical cousins. It's much the same question that dubstep faced at the beginning of this year, and dealt with superbly, but on a much weightier scale. How it answers it will be instrumental to its future development as a genre.
