Humanties Final

Mason Lee Hammond

HUMN1101

12/8/14

I am an impressive fan of music in general, enjoying everything from soft, easy listening to some hardcore heavy rock. Out of all of the music genres I listen to and enjoy, I find dubstep the most interesting, entertaining, and pleasurable. I started listening to dubstep on online radio stations in around 2008 to 2009 and found it was very pleasant to listen to for long periods of time and fit a very wide range of emotions I could easily identify with. At the time, I was searching for a new genre of music to experience to no success. Growing up in the age of computers, online song databases, and pirated music flooding the internet, I began to sample and listen to anything I could get my hands on a very early age. Dubstep emerged at almost the exact time I expected something new and fresh to fill the void left between distinct genres.

Dubstep is a genre of electronic, mostly computerized, dance music that was slowly devised in South London, England. It emerged in the late 1990s as a development and progression within a family of related styles such as 2-step garage, broken beat, drum and bass, jungle, dub and reggae. In the UK the origins of the genre can be traced back to the growth of the Jamaican sound system party scene in the early 1980s. The music generally features syncopated and modified drum and percussion patterns with bass lines that contain prominent sub bass frequencies. The earliest dubstep releases date back to 1998, and were usually featured as B-sides, the second face of a record, of 2-step garage, electronic dance music, single releases. These tracks were darker, more experimental remixes with less emphasis on vocals, and attempted to incorporate elements of breakbeat and drum and bass into electronic dance music. IMO Records states, “in 2001, this and other strains of dark garage music began to be showcased and promoted at London's night club Plastic People, at the “FWD>>” (forward) which went on...