I Was There When Dubstep Happened
and I don’t care if nobody remembers me
To hell with this, I thought. I’m going to get my ass robbed out here.
It was 2007, on a Tuesday night, and I was wandering around on an unfamiliar street in Los Angeles, looking for some invite-only dubstep party a friend had told me to attend.
I didn’t even know what “dubstep” was, but he convinced me I should go. By myself.
“Trust me,” he’d said. “You’ll love it.”
Just as I was contemplating getting back into my car and driving the hour back home, I found the address. But something wasn’t right. The numbers painted on the wall matched the ones I’d written down, but I didn’t hear any music. There was just a plain, unmarked door.
Suddenly, I noticed the door crack open about an inch. I grabbed the handle and tried to yank it open, only to find a tall white dude standing on the other side, his hand firmly gripping the other end.
“Uh, is this where the party is?” I stammered.
He looked at me. Not angrily, but not particularly nicely. “I don’t know. Is there something you want to tell me?”
It took me a second, but then I realized: he was asking me for the password. Jesus, I thought. These guys are serious.
My mind went blank for a moment, then I suddenly remembered the two words that had been sent to me the night before from Pure Filth’s Myspace account.
“Uh… Ceiling …crumbs?”
Bingo. He opened the door. “Come on in.”
I walked in, paid my five dollars, and went downstairs, because that was where the music was coming from.
What follows next is a little hazy. I vaguely remember doing what everyone does when they first get to a concert where they don’t know anybody: I posted up against the wall and pretended to be engaged in a very important conversation via SMS. But eventually, I put the phone away, and then I started to listen.
Partially to the music. It was familiar, but completely unsettling. Sparse, echoey, and loud, but a kind of loud that I’d never heard before. That was because of
The speakers.
They were stacked from floor to ceiling. There was enough hardware in there to melt a small village. But the system was perfectly tuned. It was too loud to hear the person next to me, and the bass was forceful enough that I could feel my heartbeat gently being nudged faster or slower depending on the tempo of the song. But my ears didn’t hurt, and it was never uncomfortable.
(As it turns out, they had been using the subwoofers originally installed for theater showings of the 1974 film Earthquake — the same speakers that had cracked the plaster ceiling of Grauman’s Chinese Theater the first time they used them, and in another theater, killed all the goldfish in a pet shop across the mall.)
and then a guy picked up the microphone.
whoa.
I’d heard people rap over electronic music before, but this was different. He communicated ideas to us. Sang slowly, quickly. Crooned through the snares and shouted over the vocals because, even though we didn’t know it yet, that’s what we had come to see.
And right there, at some moment that I can’t precisely recall, was when I completely lost my mind.
That night, underground, surrounded by dozens of people I had never met and would never meet again, I had the closest thing to a religious experience that I’ve ever had.
At one point, the MC began to call out to me. Not to me personally, but by that point, I was both the only person in the world and one of billions anyway. I can’t remember the exact words, but he was telling us, he was telling me, that I had to join him. That I had worked all day yesterday, and would work all day tomorrow. For someone else. But right now, he needed me, we needed me. To work for me. For us.
We had to dance. And it would be hard work, but I, we had to do it. My, our, souls depended on it.
If there is a god, he or she or they were in those bassbins that night.
If I hadn’t been so completely out of my mind, I think I would have cried. Or maybe I did cry. I don’t remember. Really, I don’t remember anything else from that night. Not leaving, not the ride home, nothing.
Well, except one brief moment where I remember looking around and thinking:
who are these people?
Before this, I’d been proud of my ability to fit in anywhere. I went to hip-hop concerts, punk shows, indie concerts, raves, you name it. All of these had a uniform, an unwritten code.
Even raves, for all their PLUR philosophy, had their own segmentation: if you plugged your ears and walked into a room, you could generally tell whether it was trance or jungle depending on what the kids were wearing, or even just by looking at the expressions on their faces.
As diverse as any of the above looked to an outsider, once you actually understood the particular scene, you realized how homogenous it really was. After spending my younger years as a perpetual outsider, I’d learned how to identify these unwritten rules, and adapt.
This place wasn’t diverse, though.
This was just complete chaos. There were dudes wearing Rocawear and eyeliner. People with piercings and blue mohawks. Brown dudes my age. Black women twice it. Some laughing, some grimacing. No two people danced the same.
In hindsight, I guess this seems obvious: after all, dubstep was a new enough genre for us in California that it hadn’t yet created a uniform. There were no rules yet — there was no hand waving or “when I say hip, you say hop” like at rap shows, there was no exchanging of sparkly bracelets like at raves. Nobody, probably not even the DJs, knew what they were doing.
We were making it up as we went along.
So yeah, for a second, I felt exposed. During a lull in the music, I came back to myself, and freaked out. Was I dancing properly? Was I dressed appropriately? I realized I didn’t understand how to fit in here, because I’d forgotten to scan the room and figure out where “here” was.
But a moment after that flash of doubt, that sudden discomfort and need to figure out what box we all fit in, the DJ slammed the crossfader over to the other side, and a new kind of sound washed over my body. I forgot about everyone else, because it didn’t matter.
I probably only made it out to three or four of these events. I always went alone. My Tuesday pilgrimages were cut short partially by a study abroad trip, and partially by somebody stealing all of the crew’s equipment. One night, maybe a night I was there, somebody waited until Pure Filth had loaded all of their equipment into their U-Haul trailer. Then they hitched it up, and drove off.
I’m not sure if they ever got it back.
At the time, I was sure that dubstep would never go mainstream.
After my first night, I tried listening to a few tracks I’d dug up (read: illegally downloaded) online, and I immediately regretted it. There was no point, I figured, in listening to this stuff at home. The same tracks I’d lost my mind to in that basement sounded like cheap MIDI files at home, even on the $80 Sennheiser headphones I’d stolen from the college radio station I was working at.
There was something comforting about this — not because I wanted my precious new genre to stay hidden and unsuccessful, but because this meant that any new initiates to this new cult would have the opportunity to experience it properly.
Of course, I was completely wrong.
“Dubstep” quickly became synonymous with “wobbly bass,” and Skrillex perfected the art of tweaking bass frequencies high enough so that they would squawk through tinny iPhone speakers, thereby circumventing the need for massive subwoofers. Dre Beats came out, and convinced everyone they were hearing real bass.
Over the past few years, the genre has splintered into YouTube-search-friendly subgenres: chillstep, brostep, glitchstep, dubhop. There’s probably a baby formula commercial with dubstep in it by now.
Which is fine, I guess. It’s how it happens. Besides: I never went to the Paradise Garage or CBGBs, and I missed out on the South Bronx block parties, but if anyone ever asks me about dubstep, I can smile and say:
Yes, I was there.
Okay, so maybe that seems misleading. I’m not sure when exactly dubstep started, or where. I don’t know where the first dubstep record was played. I know that it wasn’t May 2007, and that it wasn’t in California. But really, I don’t care. Because that’s not what I mean when I say I was there when it happened.
What I mean is that when the music was playing, when the MC was shouting, or singing, or preaching, or whatever he was doing,
I was there.
I was present. I was focused. I was in that room, and nowhere else. I think my eyes were closed most of the time, but I could feel everything.
Which is why that moment was so important to me. Because really:
How many of us are ever truly here?
How often? When you’re eating, talking to your friends, making love, are you actually there? Or are you somewhere else, thinking about your job, or the last episode of Game of Thrones, or your last boyfriend?
When’s the last time you ate lunch with a friend without checking Instagram? People like to ask each other when the last time they saw the sunrise was, but seriously — the last time you saw it, were you paying attention?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a scholar. I get paid to multitask and overthink. When people are talking about something, I’m usually not listening. I can’t even listen to music for fun anymore, because I’m too busy thinking about why they are singing, how they are singing it, and how I might be able to work it into my dissertation. That’s my job right now.
But one time, I was there.
I’m not telling you to throw away your phone, or that I’m out here living some sort of Zen lifestyle. I’m not.
All I want to say is that one time, for a couple hours, I was there. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I know. I remember.
When the music happened, I was there.
