I’m going to say something that might make a lot of people discount me as a critic because of how many people hate dubstep:
I like dubstep. It’s an innovative genre that employs unique sounds and incredible adaptability.
Some of my dubstep rant came in at the end of my Genre rant (part 1) but I’d like to expand on it here. I think this applies a lot to other electronic music as well, but I’ll stick to something I’m more familiar with for the moment.
To me dubstep is some of the purest music on the market today. Part of what makes music of any genre so strong is the sheer number of interpretations it can. This makes music incredibly personal. Music with lyrics, however, has a core to guide the listener. Words have meanings and those meanings may not always trigger the same feelings in every person, but there will be at least some commonalities. Lets look at the last verse of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.”
“If I could start again
a million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way.”
For anyone who’s heard this song, the lyrics alone are enough to give the listener chills. It is a simple piece at first glance. However, ask yourself. Is this verse saying that the singer has lost himself completely and that he is finally broken or that despite this loss he is going to “find a way?” And what does that entail?
The song does not explicitly answer these questions, but I guarantee anyone who cares about this song enough to look closely will answer both of those questions differently. However, you would be hard pressed to find someone who did not interpret this song as being about someone who has been broken by someone or something else.
(Personally, I fall with those who favor hope, but a lot of people fall with those who favor despair.)
Strip away the words. Instrumental work is much more open to interpretation than music with lyrics. Even classical pieces when taken out of context trigger lots of different responses. However, because of social conditioning, we know that certain components are supposed to trigger certain emotions. IF a song drops into a slow tempo and moves to a minor key, with predominantly strings, we know its supposed to be mournful, if a song goes into a major key and speeds up, throwing in brass and cymbals, we can assume victorious, swelling music.
But what happens when the instrumentation, and I do consider Midi Players, decks, and computers interments for this exercise uses sounds that have no precedent? How do you interpret the rippling pulse of a synthesizer? Is it the anxiety of someone running away or the exhilaration of victory? Is a sharp bass drop the sound fierce and determined or the sound of someone breaking in one sudden moment? With no other context save for what we hear, the listener has full control of his or her experience, despite the artist being the creator. Even if the artist has an emotion in mind, a song can feel completely different to a listener.
Because of it’s roots in EDM and Electronica, we can safely assume most Dubstep is designed to make you dance, but what do you feel when you hear the screeches and pulsing of something completely alien with no lyrics or tradition to guide you?
There are no universal answers to those questions. That is what dubstep is about.
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