The sex appeal of the inorganic
Like k-punk, I’d not been terribly impressed by the dubstep I’d heard up to know, until I heard the mix he points to by Autonomic. What I’d missed, and what this mix makes clear, is the relationship of dubstep to previous forms of dance music. My favorite track, at about 30 minutes in, weaves a muted classic hardcore melody into miscellaneous industrial sounds and an incredibly throbbing bassline. At first I found this beautiful but depressing, a kind of mourning for a dance music that’s now been lost. But it occours to me that it’s actually something much more interesting, because dubstep isn’t just related to an unreachable, lost, past, but to a much more immediate past, too. Dubstep effects a detournement of 2-step and, crucially, operates by taking what was most regressive in 2-step and the late UK Garage of the Dreem Team and others, and repurposing it.
“Soul” is the enemy of dance music, a return to ideologies of the organic, natural and “authentic” from which machines were supposed to have liberated us. Dubstep confronts the organicism which has captured much recent dance music, but not by a simple negation, an blunt excision of the human which would be ultimately sterile. Rather, dubstep’s reverberating alien bass, its disconnected fragments of treble, and its formless clatter of rhythms, combine to turn the organic inside out. Dubstep presents us with the perverse inorganic organicism of the machine.
This procedure should be an inspiration to revolutionaries. I’m reminded of Badiou’s remark that anti-capitalists are not simply opponents of capitalism, but more importantly rivals.
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In the meantime……
I’ll be away until Sunday evening. To keep you entertained until I return, the online version of my interview with Peter Saville is now available here. (This is the extended version - but there are still 10,000 very interesting……
Trackback by k-punk @ 6/1/2006 10:35 pm
just randomly wandered across this site. Dance music and communism in the first post! i like it already.
Comment by rob @ 6/5/2006 4:16 am