Confession time: I’ve never been able to get into dubstep. I associate it with baggy-backpacked weirdos dancing in a low, scooping motion while wearing those super-double-wide blousy blue jeans. (Dubstep originated in London, the inscrutable metropolis where people dance to music you only hear about 20 years later — “Really? You guys used to dance to the sound of trains colliding underwater?”)
For dubstep people, the sine qua non of sine qua non-ism is the bass drop:
Many dubstep tracks incorporate one or more “bass drops”, a characteristic inherited from drum ‘n’ bass. Typically, the percussion will pause, often reducing the track to silence, and then resume with more intensity, accompanied by a dominant subbass (often passing portamento through an entire octave or more …).
Okay, I do like bass drops. I like any music that gets quiet and then relaunches itself with redoubled force. Who doesn’t? It probably has something to do with when we were monkeys and had to shake trees in order to get coconuts to fall out of them: You’d shake the tree, and then there’d be a quiet beat where you’d wonder if there were any coconuts left in the tree, and then suddenly there’d be coconuts falling every which way and you’d feel a surge of energy and optimism.
Now listen to this video. Listen closely. Access your tree-shaking monkey-mind. Can you tell when the bass drops? Because, LOL, it’s really, really subtle.
Seriously, (1:02) made me laugh out loud:
Head nodding very hard much? Because that beat is sounding pretty weak. Small amount of coconuts falling out of the sky, LOL. And yes, it sounds incredible through a good stereo system. Believe me, I made sure of that.
Basically, if you tried transcribing that bass drop to musical notation, you’d have to draw a five-dimensional explosion moving sideways through time.
So first I listened to the song, and I was like, “Well, obviously that bass drop is the toughest thing I’ve ever heard, but I wonder if actual dubstep people like it?”
Let’s check the youtube comments. Umm … are the dubstep people feeling that drop very hard? Umm, LOL, I’m not sure. From the comments:
At 0:50 – 1:00 I was getting ready to jizz for the drop,and well…anyone got paper towels?
The drop sounds like a transformer orgasm!
its all about that feeling when the drop sends shivers straight through your spine!!!!!!
Bassdrop = child birth.
My favorite comment:
0:00-1:02 — “Oh, I bet this isn’t even going to be that great, just some guy that thinks he knows what dubstep is.” 1:03 — I cried, like, literally.
FRIDAY- FACE OFFS!!! Get those coconuts!!!
Okay guys, the winning video is next. Please promise me you’ll watch the whole thing. You will not regret it, I swear to you. Please just watch the next video!