In the spirit of healthy Noisey debate, I've got to respond to How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Dubstep, even if it risks me sounding like a war veteran gargling "You weren't THERE in the beginning, you don't know what it was like!"Firstly, hip-hop and dubstep have not been growing together. Hip-hop is a facet of music that encompasses more differing styles and geographical nuances that I could dare try to sum up in one sentence. In comparison, dubstep is a genre that was born in south London ten years ago (at most), is defined by its structure (Y'KNOW, THE DUB AND THE 2-STEP) and, like a lot of hybrids of bass music, had a fleeting popularity.So, I find this maddening habit of playing devil's advocate by way of "oh, you're too quotation-marks-cool for 'dubstep'" infuriating. Nah, I'm not too "cool", it's just that dubstep was dead already when people (America) still kept trying to shoehorn anything with a slight bit of reverb into its stiff corpse. The Weeknd? Not dubstep! Skrillex aping Burial? Not dubstep! The bastardised, paint-by-numbers "wait for the drop aaaand WUB WUB WUUUB WUB" noise pollution? Not dubstep! A$AP's "Wild For The Night"? Nope.I'll happily admit dubstep and I once had our good times; we chortled as someone got fingered in the blind spot of Plastic People at FWD, gurned through ear drum damage together next to other soundsystem nerds and I once hurled up rum shots to the entirety of "Night". But then I moved on.Dubstep, as it should be remembered, bowed out gracefully to the rinse and repeat cycle UK bass music has experienced, like, forever. The same cycle that had the likes of Kode 9, Mala, Benga, Joker, Plastician and Coki cutting their teeth with UK garage, before that sound went into decline and eventually spawned…dubstep! Lots of trends in dance music are very of their time and area and do not translate credibly across contintents, or even out of the club nights they were first born in. Which is TOTALLY fine. That's why when Brits try really hard to do UK hip-hop, it generally ends up like this and not like this.I agree, good music is timeless and has no genre. But it's not sulky muso snobs that are the ones getting caught up in "genre boundaries" because they get music's natural progression. It's the people who philosophise about labels and acknowledge the term "EDM" rather than completely ignoring its existence.So please, I beg you, let the memory of dubstep die in peace.
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