Ok, this one is gonna get me yelled at by some people, but let's be real. Dubstep is Over. It's been over for a while.
I'm not saying it's DEAD or it's gonna STOP EXISTING, and I'm certainly not saying it's BAD...just that its time has come and gone. A year ago, Dubstep was this time-defining hyper-relevant world-dominant sound-of-the-moment, and it's quickly turning into its own cloistered, insular, largely-irrelevant-to-the-outside-world little scene (similar to what happened to Drum & Bass in 1997-8). Many of the most interesting, creative, forward-thinking producers from Dubstep have already moved on (to UK Funky / Future Garage / Post-Garage / whatever you wanna call it), so I felt it was only fitting to do a retrospective Dubstep mix.
So here's a mix with a bunch of the huge genre-defining anthems, and a lot of my own personal faves as well.
This week, as a palette-cleanser for the non-disco-fans after all the disco of recent weeks, is a mixtape of Booty Bass. The term "booty bass" really comprises a lot of genres (Miami Bass, Freestyle, Hip Hop Electro, and Detroit Electrofunk to name a few), but they're all pretty much tied together by big, 808-driven drum machine breaks topped off with raps about ass-shaking. The key differences between this stuff and, say, ghettotech/ghetto house/juke would be the breakbeats, and the hip-hop song structure.
It's easy to forget how HUGE this stuff was in the states in the '90s, but looking back on it a lot of these tracks were Top 40 mega-hits here. I've been told by a few people that this stuff never really made it across the pond, which is a shame. I guess this was our cultural equivalent of UK Garage, perhaps?
Anyway, for this tape I've left out the Detroit Electro / Electrofunk stuff, which I'll cover some other week. I've decided to focus on classics from the 90s (some well-known, others more underground), with a few 80s proto-anthems and a couple of more recent tunes as well. Enjoy!
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tape of NY Garage (prompted by Birgitte from Norway). I went on about how that music bridged the gap between disco and house, and really paved the way for all this new-fangled 21st century electronic dance music to exist. Meanwhile, however, there was a lot of other, more mainstream R&B that was doing essentially the same thing—just in the pop sphere. Here is a tape of precisely that—more 1980s R&B cuts that rose up from the ashes of disco to pave the way for house (and everything that followed).
So I was at the all-you-can-eat sushi bar with my buddy Mega Mic, and he says to me something along the lines of the following:
"you know what's funny? you got all these weed tunes, but you don't even smoke weed!"
I think he was referring specifically to "Roll Another One" (off my last album), and "Ganja Fi Legal" (the Jacky Murda track I remixed). But regardless of whether he's talking tunes I've made/released or just tunes I own/play out, he's right: for some reason I love tracks about weed. So here's a mix of weed anthems. I've probably dropped a dozen or so weed-related tunes throughout previous mixes, so those ones aren't on this one, but it's still pretty packed. You're probably either going to find this the most awesome thing in history, or the most tedious, juvenile yawnfest ever. Or both!
