The Diamond in the rough, Dubstep – The Avatarization of Modern Music Antonia McLaughlin

The piano maestro Tori Amos once noted that the piano while responsible for so much godliness in its musical contribution was ultimately limited, and rightly pointed out there are only so many keys. Those keys that can only through logical conclusion produce so many combinations of melody, so as a musical artist, creation to an extent is rendered finite.
Does that hint at the piano’s eventual demise as other instruments of time past have been shipped off into obsolete-land or less benignly that musicians will run out of ways to originally combine keys and constructions? Is the remix the future bastardization of our excuse for music? No there is a savior, but more on that later. Take another case in that of the guitar; it was one of the reasons the aforementioned child prodigy Ms Amos got kicked out of the most prestigious piano school in the States, if not one of the most prestigious in the world, the Peabody Conservatory of Music. And all because she had the grand mad notion of wanting to turn the piano into a guitar dynamically, theoretically at least, common sense weight-appreciation aside brought about by being ever so lustily inspired at the time by one of her idols, Robert Plant of the mighty Led Zepplin. The modern day guitar in comparison has a mere six strings, even more lacking in musical doohickeys than its standard pianoforte. Will we reach a point in the near future whereby instruments become the musical dinosaur and many are forced into irrelevance becoming mere theory like the currency of money? Will one day such instruments be something that our children and their children alike gape down at in puzzlement like a high school student did last week on the tube when one businessman pulled out his cassette tape walkman to listen to something on his way to work.

So much of what we do these days is virtual and online and music is certainly following that proverbial progressive footstep. Ask yourself this question, and come on be honest, when was the last time you actually purchased a CD or a tune online. Regardless of how you legally or illegally acquire tunes these days, we still as musical listeners are subjected at least in mainstream music circles to piffling recycled rehashed generically spouted rhetorical audio accompanied by what few instruments remain subject to be allowed upon us for lack of anything else, by factory produced test tube rock stars from contrived and fixed television pop idol shows. Simon Cowell is grinning ear to smarmy ear to know so. Shouldn’t such ‘idols’ be banned too, much like steroids are for athletes in the Olympic games, after all it is a form of cheating and in the grand old form of match-fixing scheme of things; the charts at Christmas certainly showed us that in 2009 in Britain. Bring back democracy I say, of the people by the people for the people, not of the genetically engineered Kens and Barbies, by Simon Cowell and his cronies for the plebeians. The electronic age is here to take over the world of banal pop and breathe some fresh air into it. But therein also lies a problem. It involves work on the part of the listener, work and research.

As I strolled through Hyde Park last week with a friend we started talking about modern music and the genre of electronica of which we both love and which he had recently got more into. That’s about as far from the X-factor as one could hopefully go, it had all coincidentally stemmed from a Lady Gaga conversation primarily, which for better or worse popped up of its own accord, that’s the thing about Lady Gaga, she has this covert way of just popping up without ever meaning to. When I first discovered the beauty of electronica back in the days before I needed eye-cream in the 1990’s, it seemed so simple and easily definable. It had its basic forms, techno, jungle, break-beat, house, but then you got into the sub-cultures of each sub-genre, deep house, dark house, ambient house, cheeky house, hard house, the list became interminable. Gone were the days of electronica being primary colors, now describing electronica as a genre is like comparing it to the solar system, infinite, perpetual and continuing to go where no man, woman or monkey has gone before. Like technology or the Linux program it’s just as hard to keep up these days it seems, it takes work and effort, and you can’t read about it fast enough to keep up with it. It keeps multiplying and mashing with volatility like FX trading, it must be constantly and lovingly monitored for new trends and up-and-coming players on the scene. My recent love of all this electronica delight down the earplugs is anything Dubstep. Trying to explain what that meant to my baffled friend was like trying to be Sigourney Weaver’s character in that film that doesn’t even need a name anymore attempting to break down into laymen’s terms to the grunt in the wheelchair the science behind the Avataration she had created that would allow him to go over to that ethereal blue side of Pandora.

My good friend was the bemused lower-ranked senator and it was all Greek to him. I was faking Cicero badly from the pulpit in my attempt at a masterly second language, but unlike the multi-lingual statesman I wasn’t trying to eruditely flash my smarts by gushing over Dubstep the way he would rant in Greek to patronize and stupefy the other senators in his speeches. In fact I had to really stop and literally stand still alongside the bank of the Serpine, head cocked trying to collectivize my attempt at an explanation. I told him that Dubstep was the fusion of reggae and garage with heavy bass and snare drums that created shuffled and syncopated rhythms, to which he replied baffled, “synco-what?” For those of you not up with the Dubstep play, don’t feel bad, modern music takes a little more description and work that that of pop or rock does, it’s not so safe and uniform like that bread and butter 80’s music we grew up watching on Top of the Pops. It’s no longer ubiquitous guitars and drums, and some dude with big teased hair wearing tight black jeans, pointed shoes and make-up. And as for syncopation, well, after surveying about, only one good DJ mate knew the term but I doubt the average DJ does, let alone your average musical appreciative proletariat that is myself. Simply put it is a beat that is usually unstressed but in this case becomes accented instead of the usually stressed beat, to me kind of like being out of time on purpose, or hopefully not on purpose like that poor sad lad at the club who seems to be dancing to a song, but not the one currently playing, just imagine that. There that wasn’t so difficult was it, and admittedly even I had to Wikipedia that synco-whatsit.

In the growing age of all things electronic it really has become like a galaxy out there, it continues to go forth where no man or DJ has before, an infinite world where drum ‘n’ base orbits the planet Dubstep, her moons collide with trip-hop and hip-hop and crunk and IDM or EDM and glitch, and is surrounded by comets grinding, swirling and flying to that jungle beat and more. It really does become science-fiction too when you take a look at all the beat boxer software out there, just being able to use it seems to require at least mathematical genius if not a degree. It wouldn’t half surprise me either if some of that electronically created musical madness could in fact be heard one day up in space, forget sending monkeys up, I say to Nasa purchase one big fat ghetto blaster, crank it up and project that up where no ghetto blaster has ever gone before, making contact would take on a whole new meaning. And maybe for once we wouldn’t be the unsophisticated antiquated ones. Forget traveling at the speed of light, who needs that when you can dance your arse off and time travel somewhere else inside your head. It’s true, gone are the simple days of rock or roll, country or western. Gone are the days when we know what we are listening to without effort, and here are the days where we sometimes have to get an encyclopedia out to even have a conversation about what we like to play with our mates in order to give it understanding, but isn’t learning a good thing, doesn’t it help one appreciate.

Modern day music and modern day electronica is the wine for the youth club masses without the pestilential snobbishness that often goes along for the vine ride. It’s completely accessible and has open arms to everyone. Unlike wine, music doesn’t put you in a caste. You don’t have to have money or go to a swanky restaurant; you don’t need a sommelier to tell you what you should like and what is good. Because paradoxically, like music anyone can try a glass of wine and love it, it doesn’t matter the label, the vineyard, what other people think, the bumptious sommelier, the year or the price, if it goes down like liquid gold then what you like as audio gold should be no different. Tori may be right in the fact that instruments are restrictive, but when it comes to what we can do with those notes coupled with a Mac here and a sequencer, sampler, synthesizer, keyboard and drum machine there, the cocktail synthesis of genres in music continue to grow more complex and flavorsome than the New York barman’s guidebook. Verdi would no doubt have his high collars all in a flutter to comprehend the evolution of modern music or that his beloved masterpiece Requiem now lacks the ophicleide among other instruments, but such is the subtractive and added progression of music.