Dubstep

Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London in the early 2000s. The style, whose roots trace to the Jamaican sound system party scene in the early 1980s, emerged as a UK garage offshoot that blended 2-step rhythms and sparse dub production, as well as incorporating elements of broken beat, grime, and drum and bass.^[1][2][3]

Dubstep is generally characterised by syncopated rhythmic patterns, prominent basslines, and a dark tone. In 2001, this underground sound and other strains of garage music began to be promoted at the London nightclub Plastic People, at the "Forward" night (sometimes stylised as FWD>>), and on the pirate radio station Rinse FM. The term "dubstep" appeared around 2002, used by labels such as Big Apple and Tempa to describe remixes more distinct from 2-step and grime.^[4]

BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel started playing dubstep in 2003. In 2004, the last year of his show, a listeners vote included songs by Distance, Digital Mystikz, and Plastician as the top 50 for the year.^[5] Dubstep started to enter mainstream British popular culture when it spread beyond small local scenes in late 2005 and early 2006; many websites devoted to the genre appeared on the Internet and aided the growth of the scene, such as dubstepforum, the download site Barefiles and blogs such as gutterbreakz.^[6] Simultaneously, the genre was receiving extensive coverage in music magazines such as The Wire and online publications such as Pitchfork, with a regular feature entitled The Month In: Grime/Dubstep. Interest in dubstep grew after BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs launched her "Dubstep Warz" show in January 2006.^[7][8][9]

Towards the end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s, the genre started to become more commercially successful in the UK, with more singles and remixes entering the music charts. Music journalists and critics also noticed a dubstep influence in several pop artists' work. Around this time, producers also began to fuse elements of the original dubstep sound with other influences, creating fusion genres including future garage and the slower and more experimental post-dubstep. The harsher electro-house and heavy metal-influenced variant brostep, led by American producers such as Skrillex, boosted dubstep's popularity in the United States.^[10]