Excision Responds to Bassnectar's Claims on Dubstep Being "a Thing of the Past"
Nobody likes being labeled, and two weeks ago, Bassnectar addressed this issue in a conversation
Nobody likes being labeled, and two weeks ago, Bassnectar addressed this issue in a conversation with Star Tribune. Feeling that the term “electronic music” is an inaccurate description for his music, Bassnectar shares:
“I don’t even view ‘electronic music’ as a thing anymore. That’s like saying, ‘An electronic day.’ The world is electronic. All music is electronic these days, unless it’s someone playing an acoustic guitar on a porch. Kenny Chesney’s music is electronic, and Jay Z’s, Justin Bieber’s. It’s all made using electronic equipment. It’s consumed using electronic machines.”
Ironically, he proceeded to comment on dubstep music and its current state:
“Dubstep obviously is already a thing of the past. This new wave of shoegazer, hipster brand of dance music that’s popular this year — which I think is boring as hell — will soon be a thing of the past. New terms and styles will emerge. But the broader brand of electronically enhanced dance music — which I just think of in my heart as just music — will always have an audience.”
British Columbia, Canada producer Excision took to Facebook to respond to Bassnectar’s claim, claiming that the genre’s decrease in popularity results in a “reduction in quantity, and an increase in quality.”
I wanted to share my perspective as I see a lot of misinformation floating around.
The reality is that Dubstep became bigger than anyone ever expected it to, and for a time, a large portion of the people attending shows were there because it was the “cool” thing. Those people have all moved on to the next hipster trend, and the Dubstep scene was left with all the people who are there for the music.
In my opinion that’s a huge win. For someone outside our scene looking in, it would make sense if ticket sales, track sales etc completely fell off the map. I can’t speak for other artists, but for me, they have been steadily increasing every year and continue to do so. The amount of energy I’ve seen from dance floors this year puts the previous years to shame! Part of this is because the crowd has been refined to music lovers, the other part is because there has been a reduction in quantity, and an increase in quality.
We are seeing all the guys who got big in Dubstep experiment with making a wide variety of genres, and that’s a good thing. It’s fun to mix things up, and you can hear the influence of Dubstep sounds in every current big genre from Trap to Downtempo stuff to nearly every subgenre of House. It’s influenced other genres so much that the internet explodes with people arguing over what’s what. Forget about classifying everything, but if you must, I prefer to simply use the catch-all “Bass Music”.
Regardless of how popular a genre is, its popularity has nothing to do with how we feel about the music that we love, and that’s how it should be. Spread and support music you love.
What are your thoughts on this?