This afternoon I decided the thing I needed was to listen to something angry with a heavy bass track, or twelve, so I pulled up some Killsonik on my iTunes and tried to piss myself off. It didn't work super well, but I got to thinking why I like this kind of sound, and if I can't be sourcelessly vexed then I can be introspectively miffed. Same difference, a lot of the time. Anywho.
I have a friend, who is really awesome, who does freelance artwork and recently got work with the Monstercat label. I can pretty much source my interest in dubstep back to her, because my biggest exposure for the longest time was Skrillex and, ha ha, but that's a bit like saying one is a fan of blues because one knows Bing Crosby. I'm sorry, but you don't know fucking anything about blues if that's all you listen to. Not that Bing Crosby is a bad singer, but he's entry level. He's the Top 40's of blues. Everyone's heard him, so you don't get any points for saying you like his shit. Skrillex is a lot like that, but dubstep.
So I listen to Skrillex, and some Benny Benassi remixes of Euro electrohouse stuff, along with video game soundtracks and whatever Japanese AMVs my antisocial internet mule friend throws at me. Not exactly shaking the pictures off the walls over here. Dubstep didn't really get on my radar until I was living in a house with six or seven other people, a few of whom were pretty ardent techno/electronica fans. They went to see Pretty Lights in concert, which I wish I could've done with them because it sounded pretty baller, but alas I had other shit. But I remember one discussion in particular about dubstep proper, which came about because someone was listening to some remixes on youtube and another guy was getting annoyed by it because they sounded like garbage. The line that stuck out at me was, 'yeah, there's some good dubstep out there, but there's also a lot of complete garbage.'
Meanwhile I was getting pretty heavily into VK and symphonic metal, so I just shrugged and let it be.
The first non-Skrillex dubstep song I think I got hooked on was Internet Friends. Natch. My friend from earlier, the Monstercat artist, has some really pretty wicked Knife Party fanart, and I had no idea who the fuck those guys were, so I looked up some of their stuff, and Internet Friends is what came up. And it was...fucking hysterical. I love the lyrics to that goddamn song, and I just couldn't stop listening to it. It reminded me of another track I'd heard, like a few months prior to that point, I was down in New Orleans for Mechacon and they have a rave there, and one of the DJs played this track where Microsoft Sam and female equivalent were arguing back and forth I think it might've been called Crazy Psycho Bitch but I have no actual clue. But that association, plus the darkly humorous quality of the words themselves, stuck and so I became a Knife Party fan.
But that wasn't really enough for me. I'd tasted of EDM and wanted to see what else was out there, which was a little weird at first because when I was younger I was that kid who pointedly refused to listen to a lot of music on the grounds that 'there wasn't any skill involved in it'. Christ, what a wanker. It took some searching, but I broke into the genre eventually and found there were a lot of really good tracks out there. There was one problem, though: I was continually struck with the thought that, of the stuff I found listenable, it really didn't cover a wide range of moods. Like, there's chill dubstep, that's your Zedd's Dead for example, or Modestep if you're a fucking closet house fan; there's dubstep you can rock out to, which is ultimately the point so it stands to reason, and this stuff doesn't just apply to dancing, you can take it running or down to the gym, or sparring if that's what you're into (i'm into that). It's probably just a mark of who I am as a person, but I found myself wanting a lot less positivity in my dubstep. I wanted tracks I could fuck shit up to, and most of what I listened to just didn't do that for me. Maybe it's because I'm just not often in that kind of mood, or I'm very good at suppressing it, I don't even know. But dubstep should be the stuff that gets me crazy--I saw Excision in concert and the bass was loud enough to resonate in my lungs, if it weren't for the fact I was pretty wiped by that point in the night I'd've been less meh about it.
I probably just don't listen to as much of it as I'd like. All the artists in my library I know a thing or two about, and my brain just takes that depth of knowledge and says, 'you're good, you don't need to look up any more you're already an expert'. Haha, brain, fuck you. Although, one advantage of that approach is that I can tell regional differences apart, or sometimes pick out an artist without knowing what the track's called or who it's by. Zomboy has a distinctive sound, as compared to Krewella or the Glitch Mob. And DJs from the UK generally all sound different than DJs from the USA, the former still taking influences from electrohouse and the latter laboring under a culture of Top 40's bullshit. But the cool thing is that even though all that's true, everyone's remixing everyone else's tracks, and collaborating and sharing and posting new stuff every day and they're still largely doing it under their own steam.
I dunno. Whenever I've run up against a pay barrier to new EDM it's always been through a site like bandcamp instead of through the bloated monster that is iTunes, which usually means that I won't be able to steal it, but I take it as a good sign anyway.
See that? My anger's all gone, and been replaced by something akin to hope. Fucking bullshit. Now I have goddamn Farrell Williams stuck in my head. Hang on, gotta fix that.
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