Know Your Subgenre: The Bros(tep)

Photo by Matthew Keever

The Doom That Came To Dubstep?

Imagine that you're a genre of music. You've been on the underground for a few years taking the sounds of your parents and evolving in to something new. For a long time few noticed but the last few years have been different. People started paying attention to what you were doing and then bigger, richer people started taking your sound and putting it in their hits. Your big moment is just up ahead, you can feel it.

And then your hyper, overaggressive little brother swoops in and steals all of your glory. He goes on to get Grammy nominations and high profile collaborations. Before you know it, not only is he more popular, people are starting to confuse you for him. They come up to you in the clubs and instead of talking about the things they like about your music they describe your little brother.

Congratulations: you are Dubstep, and your little brother is Brostep.

The label Brostep is not a term of endearment. Much in the way annoyed older siblings might refer to their younger siblings as "twerps" or "runts", long time fans of Dubstep have come up with a label for this offshoot the genre to show their displeasure with the harder, very much American style of music.

Somewhere a British guy sitting in front of his computer is looking at Skrillex videos while drinking a Red Stripe thinking to himself, "Leave it to the Americans to ruin a good thing." Now, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone as Americans have a rich history of taking styles of music to their logical, aggressive extreme. We heard heavy metal and decided, "No, we can go faster," and thus we have a Big 4 of thrash metal. When rock wasn't enough, when punk wasn't enough, we created hardcore and in Black Flag and Bad Brains we trust. And so when Dubstep wasn't hard enough, wasn't dirty enough, wasn't noisy enough, we gave the wobble bass an injection of aggression.

Which leads us to Sonny Moore, he of Grammy nominations and countless comedy Tumblr accounts, better known as Skrillex.