Of all genres with complex legacies, dubstep ranks as one of the strangest. It’s less than 20 years old, yet already feels like it’s been through more ups and downs than a low-frequency oscillator. A victim of its own success in many ways, the sound which felt so fresh in early 2000s London soon hit the global mainstream and imploded.
Its roots go deep into Jamaican-British sound system culture, incorporating the heavy bass elements of dub reggae, the skippy syncopated drums of jungle, drum & bass and broken beat, plus the deft melodic lightness of UK garage. It emerged as a distinct form around 2001, when the dark garage of producers like El-B and Zed Bias morphed into something new, coalescing around 140bpm with a strong (but not mandatory) emphasis on halftime two-step rhythms, an obsession with sub bass and a minimal beat overlaid with more complex percussion.
The role of specific clubs and record shops is often overplayed in genre histories, but for dubstep it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Big Apple record shop in Croydon and the FWD>> (‘Forward’) night at the Velvet Rooms in central London (later moving to Plastic People, Shoreditch). At the former, staff and regulars included DJs and producers Artwork, Hatcha, Mala and Coki of Digital Mystikz, Loefah, Skream and Benga. At the latter, the nascent scene would gather to test out new dubplates and luxuriate in sub bass, with regular DJs including Skream, Kode 9, Benga and Ramadanman (aka Pearson Sound). Digital Mystikz would also go on to launch their own DMZ night, with regulars including Youngsta and Pinch among others. From this central core, a scene grew.