Dubstep sounds like drugs. Ask anyone who has sipped from the rubber lips of a contraband balloon in the muffled strobe of an underground warehouse party, and they will confirm this for you. In no way am I advocating trying the hippie crack yourself. Up with hope, down with dope. Dubstep, however, is fair game for advocacy.
Dubstep sounds like drugs. Ask anyone who has sipped from the rubber lips of a contraband balloon in the muffled strobe of an underground warehouse party, and they will confirm this for you. In no way am I advocating trying the hippie crack yourself. Up with hope, down with dope. Dubstep, however, is fair game for advocacy.
Dubstep also sounds like a movement. Distinct from the ubiquitous raver scene of the 90’s, this subculture seems united more by a set of shared philosophies than it is by the rapacious appetite for synthetic psychedelics that defined its predecessor, and dubstep has become its soundtrack. The philosophies center on Radical Self Expression, Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Radical Self Reliance, Leave No Trace, and a participatory spirit that encourages attendees at any event to be part of the entertainment as well as observers, making the environment a kind of collaborative installation artwork. It is as though an entire faction of activists set about creating the world in which they’d like to live for short periods of time, in isolated locales, rather than screaming at buildings to evolve.
This is burner culture, and while its name suggests a dedicated orbit around the Burning Man event, it is a much broader subset that includes what would superficially be identified as hippies, ravers, bohemians, technophiles, primitivists, anarchists, nudists, drag queens, scenesters, exotic dancers, tattooists, construction workers, environmentalists, fire spinners…. I could go on, but basically imagine a vortex of all the freaks and closet freaks conceivable, united in an all-inclusive spirit of unfettered human expression, put them in a field, a warehouse, a backyard, and flip on Wu Tang Meets The Indie Culture Vol. 2: Enter The Dubstep.
It’s not that it is the most well produced dubstep I’ve heard. But it’s not bad. Mixed by a team of renowned producers in the style, at times the uncustomary blending of hip-hop and dubstep seems slightly contrived, the vocals stumbling over the wonky low-pass bass. For the most part, however, it is a bounce-inducing exploration of the rarely entertained boundaries between mainstream and underground, a successful experiment in the abolition of genre dedication comprised of remixed Wu-Tang favorites. The star of the album, “Wu-Tang”, the DZ remix, captures an epic momentum and is flawlessly rendered, displaying the quintessence of dubstep and the lyrical prowess of Wu-Tang with near-perfect compositional insight.
However, it is the popular accessibility of mixing a subterranean electronic music style with one of the most famous hip-hop groups to ever unleash their poetic kung-fu on the planet that makes this album truly important, revolutionary, and possibly dangerous. This project has the potential to popularize dubstep, and as mainstream culture has this disturbing tendency to exploit the spirit of the indie trends it draws from, quite possibly burner culture as well. It also has the capacity to catapult DJs and producers previously toiling in an arena of little commercial viability into a lucrative limelight.
It’s a wide and unknowable door this album has opened to the future of our musical landscape, and while I will be forever wary of anything that threatens to commodify a movement as creatively human and un-materialistic as the burners, it has never been the spirit of that movement to let fear stop the dancing. So, until the corporate world sets its dirt and greed upon the parties where dubstep rolls its slow stomping carpets out into the dawn, it is that doorway in which I’ll be dancing my ass off, to the sound of poetry and drugs.
