My younger brother said “listen to this song, it’ll totally change your mind about dubstep” and pressed play
and I saw men with chin-straps rhythmically rubbing their genitals against the backsides of girls rolling on powdered ecstasy purchased from roommates’ younger brothers (they only deal now, and occasionally pop an Oxy when the going gets tough); saw the men swivel these girls around and assault them with tongues made geographic from nights spent with friends, smoking (allegedly) medicinal weed and talking about the cool sex-related things they have done with girls whose names (or internal lives) aren’t important to them and the stories they are telling; saw four hundred dead eyes briefly brighten for The Dubstep Drop, saw a whole club run in slow motion towards a men’s room with one hundred stalls, each equipped with a toilet specifically designed for sex with strangers (there used to be only one, regular toilet, then dubstep and its attendant drop came around and the club’s manager figured the kids might as well be comfortable and besides they can’t control themselves), and oh man the noises, standing in the center of that blue-lit bathroom while post-drop the songs resumes and intensifies its prior course and two hundred future and current reality television stars loudly go about their business.
And of course, having watched too much television growing up, I didn’t actually “see” any of that; some crucial imaginative function was short-circuited by Ren and Stimpy re-runs when I was very young, so that I don’t have the three-dimensional visions that I figure folks who were raised by Hobbits and Captain Ahab are privvy too. But I felt it, and one of the reasons I enjoy writing (besides the sex and the money) is it allows me to articulate and maybe understand these like small second-long flashes of feeling. So I felt those Ed Hardy catalog stereotypes having bathroom sex somewhere deep inside me (is something I just typed) and I at first felt guilty, because who am I to judge, obviously not all dubstep fans are predatory misogynistic cologne-abusers, I’m sure many if not most of them are engineers or accountants or law students or whatever who here and there enjoy chemically depleting the small supply of neurological happiness we are granted at birth in order to lose themselves in a sympathetic crowd of young flailing sweaty and (in some cases) muscular limbs. But mostly I was excited: This music, this one song by this guy named Porter Robinson, an 18-year old from North Carolina, was exciting me more than all the Viles and Garbuses and Bejars I’d dutifully consumed as part of a (severely un)balanced but internet-prescribed indie diet over the last year, because it felt really truly genuinely NEW, you know? (And of course it wasn’t, but more on that in a second.)
My friend Joe’s a former jam band kid and recent retiree of the LA rave scene, and I once watched him accidentally ingest speed and run crazed through a Tennessee field (i.e. “I went to Bonnaroo”) frantically waving a sort of glow stick glove, and when this past Thanksgiving break I told him I was getting into this guy Porter Robinson he scoffed in much the same way I might scoff if he told me he’d been getting into this guy Bon Iver: the expert condescending to the noob. And that’s the scary thing, for me, about leaving my musical comfort zone: I’ve spent all these years building band by band a home I can walk around warm and blindfolded in, laying first the foundation w/ the Canon (in my particular situation bands like Pavement, Built to Spill, GBV, MBV, etc, but maybe you’re into hip-hop or ambient or swing, or maybe you’re once of those people who says “I listen to everything” and fucking means it) and then slowly filling in the rest w/ bands increasingly similar and obscure, that to be thrown from my easy chair made of Sarah Records seven-inches into a completely new home made of totally foreign materials, to stagger through its strobe-lit darkness with no real context or ability to say “this is clearly derivative of Bandwagonesque-era Teenage Fanclub,” is terryfing to me. When online you can personalize all the culture you take in and effectively shut out everything that doesn’t gel with your own personal aesthetic, it’s sometimes easier to close the blinds and keep ornamenting your own little house.
The reason I think I was excited though was, okay: Bon Iver, judging by record sales and TV appearances and amount of press received, is undoubtedly more popular than Porter Robinson or any of his electro-cohorts. But the thing with Bon Iver, and with a whole lot of the indie rock I’ve given a sizable (and one might even say super (kill me)) chunk of my time on this earth to, is that it’s music designed to be listened to alone. You can listen to it in groups, and people do (although hopefully while also, like, talking, because the image of people sitting around a table and just kind of looking at each other while listening to Bon Iver is strangely unsettling), but it’s dubstep and music like it that’s dictating the movement of hundreds of thousands of people in seedy college basements and seedier urban clubs every Saturday night, and while I may not know these people personally or have any interest in joining them, even just listening to this stuff on headphones makes me feel more connected with all the other people who have and who will soon struggle to find employment in an employment-resistant economy, all the future 40-year-olds who will fifteen years from now laugh at how wrong “I Love the 10s” or whatever got its dubstep bit.
Because it really does feel like a privately shared secret between a whole lot of young people, which I figure is part of its appeal: Your mom’s not going to hear Porter Robinson on NPR and ask if you’ve heard of him the way my mother has asked me about Okkervil River and the Hold Steady, and however many times a kid vomits up six Keystones and his dinner in a frat house bathroom to the tune of Robinson’s “Say My Name” it will not be passed from father to son or canonized by critics. It’s public music, and it’s as ephemeral as the nights it soundtracks, the bits and bytes that give it life in a coked-out DJs MacBook.
And anyway all I can really do is listen, alone, and try to understand this stuff, and hang out in the library, and hope that some of what I’m saying here makes sense.
