Dubstep and Breakstep

[intoccabile]

Here are a few questions for you all.

Is there, in your opinion, a conscious collective effort to remove, so to speak, Breakstep from the Dubstep continuum / melting pot ?

Is Breakstep being " excluded ", being pushed at the periphery of the Dubstep continuum ?

Is it possible that the importance of the " breaky sound " in the constitution of dubstep as a genre is being increasingly misevaluated ?

What do you people think ?

I found one very interesting thread on this matter on nuskoobreaks.co.uk, and a rather enlightening post on the Hijack forum.

Here are some opinions that struck me :

" I definitely agree that the 'breakstep' sound seems to have been removed from what dubstep now actually 'is'. I've always thought it could be due to a few things. Noticeably the big guns who created that sound, such as Toasty, Darqwan and Search & Destroy were exceptionally quiet when Dubstep blew-up last year after the 'Dubstep Wars' Breezeblock show. Also, on that show there was nobody representing the 'breakstep' sound and thus people who were first introduced into Dubstep via that show (and that's a LOT of people) never heard it and that's a shame. [...] "

" [...] even 'hotflush' back in the day got dissed for being a breaks label causing the rise of 'scuba' the label to accomodate the more downbeat and dubby aspects of what they wanted to release as did 'storming productions' do the same with 'dub police' leading to 'scarecrow' and 'caspa' being created to counter 'quiet storm' and one half of 'S&D' [...] "

[jimitheexploder]

I've not really heard much new Breakbeat / Breakstep stuff since the early 2000's I kinda defected from the Nu-Breaks camp as I felt it was getting stale and found more love in techno / minimal / house / electro and Dubstep more recently.

I'm sure there is good things still going on in the scene and people could swing some breakbeats into dubstep I'm sure.

[oddfellow]

If Toasty had been on the original dubstep wars it would have been amazing.

I think with himself and S&D its just been one of those things. From what I've heard Toasty's job doesn't allow him a lot of free time and S&D lost a lot of their music didn't they?

[spiderman]

i cant speak for others.

but personally i thinks its as welcome as all the other influences...

the genre is dubstep, so wen tunes are more breaky then dubstep then its more likely influence gone the other way.

i like a lot of the breaky influence dubstep tunes floating about.

i think its tunes which are more breaks than dubstep are the ones ppl may not wanna push in the dubstep scene, for obvious reasons.

[spooKs]

If Toasty had been on the original dubstep wars it would have been amazing.

I think with himself and S&D its just been one of those things. From what I've heard Toasty's job doesn't allow him a lot of free time and S&D lost a lot of their music didn't they?

isn't it mad how 'mundane' issues have such a big factor in this music, which personally, is one of the biggest things in my life. one of the funny things about the underground music

[thinking]

Is there, in your opinion, a conscious collective effort to remove, so to speak, Breakstep from the Dubstep continuum / melting pot ?

no! The idea of some conspiracy is absurd - do you envisage non-breakstep producers/DJs/label owners having clandestine meetings to bring about the death of breaky dubstep?

imo it's simply not possible for a small group of people, however influential, to guide the development of a music 'scene' or genre. Once the music is sold and performed to the public, the punters take ownership and guide its growth and development via their consumption.

" [...] even 'hotflush' back in the day got dissed for being a breaks label causing the rise of 'scuba' the label to accomodate the more downbeat and dubby aspects of what they wanted to release as did 'storming productions' do the same with 'dub police' leading to 'scarecrow' and 'caspa' being created to counter 'quiet storm' and one half of 'S&D' [...] "

I think this makes quite a few negative assumptions that, whilst I'm not in a position to confirm their truth or not, skew the argument in favour of poor old 'downtrodden' breakstep. Perhaps Lohan just wanted an outlet for his own output that was markedly different from the S&D stuff. Perhaps Quiet Storm just wanted to be able make music without people having any misconceptions, hence he invented an alter ego. Likewise, maybe Paul Rose fancied having an imprint where he could release his own music, as opposed to necessarily the music he selects for Hotflush (the two don't have to be mutually inclusive!).

I'm only making (educated) guesses as well, but it gives another angle to why the people mentioned might have done certain things. What I'm trying to point out is that it's facile to assume they did these things to consciously move away from breaky music, possibly in a concerted effort to marginalise it.


In all honesty, I think the most damaging thing to the music you like and make is trying to draw some imaginary demarcation lines between related styles of music.

[setspeed]

breaksy dubstep is coming back! at least i hope it is, i've bloody spent enough time writing it.

[seckle]

The idea of some conspiracy is absurd

150%

the amount of rhetoric in regards to a sub-genre of music being "victimized" or thrown into a corner, hasn't helped anyone.

from my memory a lot of the names being associated with "breakstep" were the early voices against the classification of the sounds into sub genres at all! around the time that the rephlex "grime 1" album came out, the name thing was a gigantic soap opera.

"is it grime?" "is it dubstep?" 'what is dubstep?" "why call it grime, when there's not really mc's over the beats?" "are rephlex trying to cash in on grime?" "are rephlex trying to divide grime?" , etc etc etc. that one album title created a wave of discussion all over the shop. clever marketing? maybe. internet breeze putting a cloud over the music? definitely. did the producers on the grime compilations benefit from the controversy? absolutely.

this whole issue continually being raised has similar strains in every genre of music i can think of. in hip hop it was the "backpack rappers" vs the "champagne rappers". in jungle it was the "dark" sound vs the "ragga" sound.

in retrospect all that genre clashing served absolutely no purpose, except to sell magazines, create journalistic careers and generally add meaningless tension for nothing more than temporary hype. think about it for a minute. did backpack rap get more successful after clashing champagne rap? did ragga jungle achieve universal acclaim by clashing mainstream dnb? i'd argue that in every case, its had nothing but a reverse effect.

when one specific sound within a larger sound becomes popular, a divide is made apparent (largely fueled by internet innuendo, just like this thread) so that the impression is that one group of people are being pushed out, when the reality is that its just a bunch of net breeze.

ultimately, there is no conspiracy. playing the role of victim in a music genre, is a waste of time. music should be doing the talking.

[efa]

In all honesty, I think the most damaging thing to the music you like and make is trying to draw some imaginary demarcation lines between related styles of music.

Nuff said, maybe a line could be drawn under these pointless genre vs genre arguments full stop?

Errrrr no, hell will have frozen over by then and I'll be able to Snow Board listening to evil bass music for eternity