'Dude. Have you heard that new Charlie Sheen remix? Totally rockin', bro!'
Following on from my post last week which examined Gibbs and Muggs' discourse on dubstep, I would like to examine the reasons for why electronic genres may be stripped down to the bare essentials and mass produced and released throughout the internet.
In 2009, VBS.TV released a documentary which examined 'donk' music and the culture surrounding it. In the documentary, donk music is portrayed as uneducated music, simplistic to the point where it is only enjoyed by teenagers and working class adults. The north/south divide is also focused on, and the documentary claims that barely no one has heard of donk in the south of England. The documentary also focused on the relation of drugs to the donk scene, especially steroids. Yet what the documentary missed was the roots of the donk sound, which are inexplicably linked to hard house. From hard house, donk artists took the 'donk' (a percussive kick beat with a massive midrange that is similar to the sound of a pipe being hit) and created tracks solely based around the percussive sound, infusing it with rap lyrics that relate to teenage life. The producer for The Blackout Crew - arguably the forefront artists of the scene - describes his method for making a 'donk':
'It's just a click virtually, so it just goes, "Dink." Like that. So what you have to do is underlay a bass underneath that, and then put a midrange sound in there aswell. So it sort of fattens the sound up.'
The Blackout Crew even go as far to claim in their most popular track, 'Put a Donk On It', that any tune can be made instantly better with the addition of a 'donk'.
This idea of applying 'donks' to all songs is apparent with a quick search on YouTube. There are a wealth of donk remixes of contemporary pop songs, including artists such as Katy Perry, N-Dubz and Eminem, all created by budding donk bedroom producers. This simple production ethic is often looked down on by hard house purists, as it turns elements of hard house music into a simple format, which arguably takes a lot less talent to produce.
Whilst donk may be big in the north, it is virtually unheard of in the south. Yet there is a similar ethic happening with a lot of commercial dubstep, or brostep, as it has been coined by dubstep purists. I am still yet to see brostep as a genre in it's own right, however for the purpose of this post I will create a distinction to describe brostep as dubstep which is mostly focused on wobbly, distorted sounds.
Like donk music, it has become something of a novelty now that with any popular track, you can expect a brostep remix to be put up on YouTube. As technology has made it easier to produce and distribute music, we are now opened up to masses of quick and easy remixes and songs that find their way onto YouTube. Music isn't the only media to be remixed through brostep. Following Charlie Sheen's epic interview where he talked of winning and tiger blood, a brostep remix found it's way onto YouTube within a few days.
The creator of the track claims:
I put the track together in 3 hours for the lols. This is what I did instead of studying for an exam. Enjoy and tigerblood
As brostep is more focused on creating big mid and hi-range sounds over melody, we can see a startling similarity to the donk songs.
Not only does brostep take the wobbly and mid to hi-range sounds of dubstep, but it also works to create humorous social critiques. With the Charlie Sheen brostep remix, Sheen is morphed into a demon surfing on a lake of hellfire, rocking out to the heavy industrial sounds.
Interestingly enough, Rusko, arguably one of the originators of the brostep sound, said recently that heavy brostep is being taken too far:
It's not heavy metal. I've been touring America for a long time, and even more so, they just want it as hard as you can. They're like "Rusko! I want you to melt my face off tonight! Play the hardest, hardest you've got!" And I'm like, it's not about playing the hardest, hardest, hardest tracks for an hour and a half. It's like somebody screaming in your face for an hour.
Rusko notes the American adoption of dubstep, and could it be that an American audience is more responsive towards a heavy sounds based on it's likeness to hard metal? Also, as dubstep is mostly a UK genre, there are less purists to speak out against heavy, wobbly brostep. Of course, this is a rather generalist notion, and it's only a theory.
Rocking out is what brostep is generally about, then. It is far removed from the melody and complex rhythms of traditional dubstep, and it exists - like donk - to give the bare essentials of a genre to an audience who are not really interested in the appreciation of music, rather just the enjoyment that it can bring to a party. Whilst neither of the two genres I have talked about here are to my own personal taste, I can definitely see why they are enjoyed. I'm just lucky enough that there is so much great dubstep and electronic music being produced under the radar that I will be kept occupied.
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