There's an image in my head, and it's the image of legions of adolescents going batshit to the most evil sounding music ever—reverb-heavy, bass-heavy, bass-led, sparse, staggering, and fucking dark. That's what I imagine the early South London dubstep scene to have been: this is my conception of Croydon in the mid 2000s.
It's important to note that I am nowhere near Croydon. I've never set foot in the UK. I never even got the opportunity to be a part of any noughties "scene". I am a 16 year old boy from suburban New York, and I'm writing this piece about South London dubstep as I embark on a 9-hour trip from Presque Isle in northern Maine, heading back home for the week.
It's raining out. I'm listening to a dubstep compilation released in 2006 by the record label Tectonic. It features some complete bangers by a few heavy-hitter dubstep producers of the time—Skream, Loefah, Digital Mystikz, MRK1, DQ1. The rundown buildings and wide, seemingly barren fields of Aroostook County are an excellent visual backdrop to this music.
Maybe those Croydon boys would like it here. I'm sure they would have found some inspiration in all of these empty houses, the mobile home parks, the plethora of little churches. Perhaps the acoustics of the abandoned Loring Air Force bunkers would remind them of the reverb plugins they used for Fruity Loops. Or maybe they'd feel suffocated in this strange area, ethnically homogeneous, where you have to drive for hours to get to the nearest semi-densely populated city, and where—paradoxically—everybody seems to listen to country music sung by people with heavy southern accents, despite being in the northern tip of the continental United States.
I got into dubstep around the same time I got into glitch and minimal techno. They make for a potent combination. I'd been listening to certain austere cuts by a few artists (e.g. Mala, Horsepower Productions, The Bug, Benga, and of course, Skream). They seemed almost like the logical continuation of glitch and minimal—the pure sine wave simplicity that took the pretentious laptop jock world by storm in the early 2000s, championed by labels such as Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton. Classic dubstep appeared similar: dark UK garage distilled down into white noise and sub bass, fat snares, claps, shuffle, triplets, swing. Sheer atmosphere.
"A vibe," Skream called it. Totally different from the puerile shit us Americans came up with after dubstep reached us, where the focus was exclusively on drops at high volumes. The American style was pejoratively called "brostep," and as it gained popularity it increasingly caused everything else in the scene to sound exactly the same. The brostep explosion eventually caused Skream—the guy who, as a teen, was the fucking king of dubstep alongside his friend Benga (met him as a kid, talked to him on the phone about music for hours at a time, finally met and sat shoulder to shoulder making tracks)—to lose his interest in the genre and to begin exclusively DJing disco, house, and techno records. This music isn't for festivals, Skream's said, it's not for large amounts of people going insane to the same records and the same drops played over and over. It's for basements and smoky clubs. Newly-pressed dubplates, songs and styles people haven't heard, the cutting edge of bass. (This is old news, anyway, all of this happened in the early 2010s. I'm not complaining. More power to him.)
I returned to New York from Aroostook last night and I haven’t had much to eat since, which has now become apparent. My arms are shaking and I can barely stand up. I'm trying to paint something on a piece of board that the neighbors threw out. Spray paint requires patience and a steady hand, neither of which I’ve got right now. I keep fucking up the amount of pressure I’m using. As a matter of fact, I can barely hold the can. I put everything down and look up at the blank, gray New York sky—too weak to do anything else, I just think about Benga's Wikipedia page. The photo they used is an image of him on stage wearing a hat that literally just says “SEX”. You can look it up right now.
The album "Diary of an Afro Warrior" is a complete gem. Dark, yes, and slamming, of course, but utterly beautiful at the same time. Dubstep is a genre that was pioneered by kids trying to make the music around them dark enough for their taste, and they did so in part by mutilating synth timbres in their digital audio workstations, giving way to the distorted, unstable basslines that dubstep has become famous for. The sound design is certainly there in this record.
I go fucking batshit to the outro track, "Tech Wobbler." It opens with this glistening, nearly ambient passage (kind of Fennesz-like, actually, but please don't quote me on that—or it sounds almost like something you'd hear on Double Cup by DJ Rashad), then launches into this hard-swinging garage-y rhythm, punctuated by swells in the bass and kick rushes. It's completely gorgeous and it floored me the first time I listened to it.
There's tracks like that, and there's tracks like "Pleasure" on this album. Depending on how weird I'm feeling, I can sometimes get marginally creeped out by its combination of an ominous pluck riff and the eponymous vocal sample, a buried, grainy little snippet of a girl saying something like "pleasure, give you pleasure." The track has these foreboding components—foreboding to me, anyway, and I throw around the word "evil" quite frequently to describe a lot of music—but it's so much of a fucking banger that it totally works. If it were any more consonant, any less evil, it'd feel wrong. The arrangement feels visceral. The whole sound seems like it's coming from a breathy voice speaking directly into your ear. And the snares sound fat as fuck.
Benga, full name Adegbenga Adejumo, announced his retirement from music in 2014, stating that he would be focusing on his family from then on. The year after, he revealed that his real reason for retirement was his mental health struggles—bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, brought on by drug use and touring. He was sectioned in 2014.
It's easy to believe that his lifestyle fucked him up to such an extent. Drug use is brought up frequently in interviews with him. There's a wonderfully sensationalist NME headline from 2012 where BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac says that Skream and Benga made "Liam and Noel look like pussies," and there are further articles elaborating on their excess, the exaggeratedly hedonistic lives that superstar DJs are said to lead. Skream's got plenty of DJ sets on YouTube, and he is noticeably drunk in many of them. Benga has stated that his time producing material in the studio is the only thing keeping him sane after the utter batshit hellraisery he engages in on tour. There's a blurry little clip of him streaking across the stage, too, and he mentioned it in an interview alongside Skream—the same interview where they talk about ecstasy and girls from Croydon and LSD lacing, I guess. Maybe this is what DJs do, or what DJs do until they get sectioned, or until they get old. I wouldn't know.
The music of Skream and Benga has soundtracked much of the past year for me. Their brand of dark, soulful dubstep, the stuff they made before the scene went to shit, scratches an itch that nothing else really does. Of course, I feel out of place listening to it sometimes, as one would once they realize that they're incredibly far removed from the world this music was made in. I type this in a darkened room in Presque Isle—I'm back in Aroostook, drove back from New York a week ago, and I feel empty. And hungry. The first frosts happened recently and the temperature is dropping fast. I can see my breath in my room in the mornings, right after I get up. Maine winters or something.
I feel like a total fucking square writing all of this introspective stuff about dubstep. I apologize.
I can't imagine touring or playing DJ sets in front of hundreds of people. I feel that I must have missed some major developmental milestone—I can't really talk to people in real life in a genuine way, I regularly struggle to find the reason why I'm still alive, and I know that I'm fucking obnoxious about all of this, too. The music helps with that. Early dubstep is sparse, spacious, exaggeratedly dark. Despite everything, I can still see myself in it. And you probably will, too.