At its best dubstep is a physical experience. When MC Skepta calls out "bassline in your nostril" he's not exaggerating. The first time I went to Brixton-based all-nighter DMZ I thought my ribs were going to cave in. The music form that has quietly quaked in London's underground in the last few years has begun to shake the mainstream in 2006, and a lot of people have liked what they've heard.
In light of this, Jamie Collinson's description of the music as a trip-hop for the noughties is a low blow: no amount of This Life revivals will save that music form from its 90s shallow grave. It's also highly misleading: dubstep is not, as he argues, a sanitised form of grime, it's a different permutation of the same strands of British music - they're at least as old as each other, dating back to the decline of UK garage in the early part of this decade. And at FWD>>: the sound is clear as day, but as brutal as the darkest grime lyric.
Which isn't to say the scene isn't facing growing pains: one of them is excessive hype around certain artists, which is hardly the fault of the musicians involved; another is the codification of the music, i.e. "this is dubstep", "this isn't dubstep", and it's true that dubstep purism will do it no favours, as I've argued myself in the past.
But the music's most interesting artists and DJs continue to mix it up: Kode9 would recoil in horror at the idea he tried to "distance himself from any association with grime" as Collinson bafflingly claims, and his sets regularly feature grime, crunk, and even Prince on one memorable occasion. The DMZ collective, meanwhile, were never really associated with grime in the first place, and their DJ and producer Loefah's tremendous reggae sets at the monthly club night Bash give the lie to the idea that dubstep's main players are monocultural.
Which is why, as leading blogger Martin Clark has pointed out, the absorption of other global sounds, from China to Brazil, will point the way forward for the music. In a forthcoming interview for Lower End Spasm, Kiss FM's grime DJ Logan Sama reiterated dubstep's global - and national - potential:
"It's because you don't have the language barrier. Dubstep's exploding widely - firstly abroad, and secondly outside of a certain cultural demographic. You can just turn up and feel bass - anyone can feel bass. If [a grime MC] is spitting bars about their everyday life, you have a cultural barrier there."
The idea that anyone can feel bass says it all. Dubstep is already becoming a global phenomenon. Whether it will, in five years time, have acquired the "DanceCorp" worldwide popularity of drum 'n' bass is a moot point. But as the recent "Roots of Dubstep" album so ably demonstrated, the music's been around for several years already, and if the queue outside FWD>> is anything to go by, it ain't going away any time soon.
