EDM in the USA  --   Guardian piece by me on rave's better-late-than-never conquest of America, covering Electric Daisy Carnival, the irresistible rise of brostep, rocktronica god Skrillex etc

"In With The Old" -- Phil at, er, The Phil Zone, on the catalogue records outselling current releases phenomenon.


Which he argues is really down to the fact that "music is no longer the driver of a youth culture which in itself no longer seems to have any inherent, coherent sense of direction", which he further relates to "the process that affects all physical and biological phenomena on Planet Earth, which is the process of entropification - the natural movement to a state of randomness and disorder."


He wonders if the concept of entropy figures in Retromania, and it does, if somewhat shifted in emphasis, as hyper-stasis. But unlike Phil's great description of cultural entropy as "a voidal stasis in which endless diversity is experienced as uniform blandness" the difference here is the hyper-ness: the restless roil of micro-genres that keep emerging but never quite take-off (but equally, never go away  completely... instead they rise and dip away and rise again -- look at black metal's serial ascents to prominence across 20 years of existence, or the strange trajectory of grime).

^^^^^^^^^

One of the few 21st Century candidates when it comes to linearity in the old fashioned sense (musical evolution, audience expansion, crossover into unconquered territories) is dubstep. The original fans, of course, see the path taken by the sound -  through wobble into brostep - as a devolution. But (c.f. rave>jungle and techno>gabba in the 90s, or indeed the history of metal itself), devolution is still a form of linearity; there's a kind of forward-logic (as opposed to the endless recursive involutions of hyperstatic genre-not-genres like postdubstep or post-mnml). Bass-tardisation is a direction. In this case (brostep), it is also -- as a centripetal, scene-forming/genre-conforming drive -- a force working against entropy. In favour of massification. Just look at the scale of the raves in America now.

This is a New Thing that is selling (but it's selling tickets, not records). (Bassnectar grossed $3.5 million this year so far. Bassnectar!)

It also seems to be serving as the locus of generational identity.  Whether any content will emerge beyond "let's go crazy" and "the parents are gonna find this incomprehensible" is yet to be seen.

Keep stompin' you bass-tardisers!

    

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, splatterstep

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 this:

Get More: The Black Keys - Gold on the Ceiling featuring Johnny Depp (Live), Music, More Music Videos

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?

B-boys on E, part 789

calling the junglist cru

the nineteeen-ninety-four posse

listen to this

listen to about the 2.10 mark

that clunking sound

that'll be your jaw

hitting the floor



yes yes it is, it is

the mighty Omni Trio

the bit that starts about 1.26 into this:



nearly fainted with surprise when that came in

not so much sampled as just superimposed, or underimposed, with the original track... which up to that point is your standard thuggish-sexist rap but then (as the "kindness of Omni Trio" tender-hearted vibe kicks in) switches to more reflective, even vulnerable tone with "strugglin' to survive" lyric

digging deeper into the album by Tyga, aka the dude responsible for "Rack City", some more Nuumstuff crops up later:



not just that echo-chambered rave siren / foghorn-bleep as heard in countless nuum-trax (most recently on a track on Zomby's nuumological pastiche EP Nothing)

but half way through, quel surprise: gratuitous (and distinctly dire) deployment of dubstep wobblage (in attempt to copy "N****s In Paris"?)