A dense cloud of smoke blinds you as you enter the place; the smell is sweet and spicy, as you walk you see people smoking skunk from a huge bong, some others from a supersized rizla, some people are wearing hoodies, some other have their hair dreadlocked long to their knees: dubstep and London city, that is all they have in common.
Bass is the base for dubstep sound, a bass that goes beyond any kind of bass heard before the existence of dubstep tunes, some people call it nasty or/and evil bass. The DJs are dropping tunes that go back to “jungle” tunes and dark drum ’n’ bass tunes, but with a crucial difference: they focus on bass riffs so thrillingly distorted, loud and hypnotically slow that you just cannot deny or either avoid the feeling of your body going back and forward to the rhythm of the music. This, essentially, is the sound of dubstep.
Is early years of the new era at Big Apple records, a new talent is born; he is Skream, he is 20, he is from Croydon and he is here to produce what it will become the first sounds of dubstep.
However, dubstep is natively from down-the-river suburbs of Brixton, in resume, a complete “ldn” sound, and it will stay like this for the next couple of years, in the dark, smoky, shoe-box-sized venues of south London. By this moment, dubstep remains in the dark, out of the hype. It is just six years later when Skream will release his first album, for which he will have some publicity in order to let know the world about dubstep, even though the female Dj Anne Hobbs is already playing some dark dub tunes at Radio 1.
Dubstep was getting known by more and more people, and at the end what made dubstep so appealing to the people (and still does) is the friendly environment of everyone sharing the same passion for the same bass beats. As many people know, this is not how we recognize or describe many if not most of the places around Leicester Square a Friday night out.
Where some girls are wearing uncomfortable heels in order to look “sexy” and “girly”, some other are wearing flat hand-made sandals or just some cheap colorful old trainers.
Dubstep is a London thing, first of all because it was originated from London, and second of all because is made from proper suburb Londoners. We don’t talk here about international guest DJs, here we talk about Rusko with his Cockney thug, we talk about Stenchman’s scary mask, and we are talking about Doctor P’s Sweet shop, just to mention some very typical things you might find in a dubstep party in London, not anywhere else.
Nowadays dubstep more than just a genre of electronic music, is becoming a whole set of a culture. A culture as Indie culture is, also natively from the UK but a bit more up north in the university city of Manchester, both with a whole kind of invisible and “unconscious” system of clothing and fashions. A typical dubstep guy would normally wear baggy sweatpants or jeans, with some old, already wasted DC shoes and finally an oversized hoodie, being this last one, the most important element of their fashion as it gives the proper dubstep “look”. Anyhow, if your dubstep influences are more rooted on good-old jungle or ragga tunes then you would want to dreadlock your long hair and wear some hand-made kind of clothing, this applies either to males to females, in dubstep (contrary to Indie) there is no difference.
In conclusion, dubstep culture in fashion, came as a counterpart and antithesis of what dancey, mainstream, electro and clubby R’n’B culture, even Indie cultures have made: separation almost complete of gender. When in almost everywhere in the world girls are trying to look the most “girly” that they can, in London’s dubstep nights they can wear from oversized colorful hoodies to hand-made skirts made from cannabis hemp (they make a fabric to be known as super resistant and 100% eco-friendly).
Long live to dubstep, i say
