If 2011 isn’t the year that dubstep reached its zenith, it’s certainly close. With extreme overexposure in movie trailers, cereal commercials, and pretty much anything signified to be dangerous or cool, dubstep is inching closer to its inevitable supernova. Let’s put this out there – dubstep going kaboom is a good thing because it’s the only way to save dubstep.
Like drum and bass or big beat before it, dubstep is hitting that point of saturation where it’s increasing harder to find evidence of what made the genre popular in the first place. I’d put most of the blame on the bandwagon jumpers – those that don’t really understand the genre, but begin doing dubstep because it’s the hot new kid on the block – as a result, we get music-makers who take the most formulaic elements of dubstep and turn them up to the extreme. Thus, for every Skream, we get ten Skrillex’s.
The bubble’s going to pop – and eventually listeners will tire and move on to the next big trend. I see the implosion as invariably a good thing:
First, the bangwagon jumpers will abandon the genre because it no longer sells – thus taking with them the worst tendencies of the music
Out of that a hardly few purists will remain – and they’ll continue making excellent music by distilling the very best parts of dubstep into its essence – i.e., Kode9, Digital Mystikz etc.
Finally as dubstep disintegrates – there will be musicians who take the genres most compelling parts and refashion them into something new and exciting. We’re already seeing artists working on the fringes – SBTRKT, Sepalcure, Egyptrixx – whose work might not be categorically considered dubstep, but they’re cribbing notes from the genre in interesting ways.
So, yeah...dubstep is dead...long live dubstep!
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