Music Genre: Dubstep

Dubstep is a fairly new genre of music that originated in South London, England. The earliest release of a dubstep song dated back to 1998. Originally the music was described as dark, more experimental, and instrumental dubbed (The “wobbing” you hear from a general dubstep song) remixes. Since then it has evolved into a much more upbeat, rave-type sound. In 2001, dubstep music began to be showcased and promoted at London’s night club Plastic People. This started a massive increase in popularity of the genre. Dubstep started off as an underground scene, but as its popularity built, mainly in the late 2000s-early 2010s, it became more mainstream and acceptable to listen to it. A very early support of the sound was BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who started playing it from 2003 onwards. In 2004, the last year of his show, his listeners voted 3 dubstep artistes in their top 50 for the year (Distance, Digital Mystikz, and Plastician). Dubstep came out of the small scene it was created in and became more mainstream in late 2005-early 2006. In fact, around this time, many websites devoted to the genre appeared on the internet which massively helped the growth of the scene, an example of one of these websites is dubstepforum. But, as well as websites, music magazines picked up on the increase in popularity in the genre. A magazine called The Wire has a regular feature entitled “The Month In: Grime/Dubstep”. In January 2006, BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs started championing the genre, beginning with a show devoted to it called “Dubstep Warz”, this pushed the popularity of the genre even further! Around 2008/09 the genre became more commercially successful within the UK, with many more singles and remixes entering the charts. Also, pop artists started using dubstep as the backing tune to some of their songs, such as Boucne & Boom by Box Bottom (which also featured in a Vimto advert). In 2010, something massive happened to the genre. A new artist whose music genre was called “Brostep” (a branch of Dubstep, much heavier and ‘ravey’) hit the scenes and set the popularity off the scale. His name is Skrillex, and to-date, is the most popular dubstep/brostep artist. The rise of Skrillex and the genre brostep helped increase the popularity more worldwide, with his own tours in the USA, Spain, Brazil, and the UK all selling out.  

By Lewis Finney