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. 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 first appeared in 2001, and was then used by labels such as Big Apple and Tempa from 2002 to describe remixes more distinct from 2-step and grime. 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. 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.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Dubstep”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

dubstep is genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 28 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶