Staffer's Note

If you know me, then you know that I fancy myself an intellectual. I find myself a well-made man, one who reads works of high literature well and writes them better, who has great taste in the arts and is just at home with an aria by Handel as he is with the choreography of Merce Cunningham. And if you know all of that, then surely you can assume that I am also a fan of dubstep.

It’s hard to sum up exactly why I feel the way I do about dubstep—or, as I prefer to call it, “dubstream”—but I think that the ineffable within it is somehow rooted in its entirely democratic nature. I always prefer those forms of art that can be accessed by the layman, and dubstream is the epitome of such a form, as I found out when the sound system of my car took a turn for the worst last week. I was still able to acquire my daily dubstream fix in a pinch, by pouring a hundred screws into my car’s engine and jamming a wrench into its radiator. And as I drove around, listening to the new dubstream song I had created , I realized that the broken car radio could be put to use as an instrument for further dubstream production in the future.

This ties readily into my next point regarding dubstream, which has to do with the ways its artists push the envelop in terms of the instruments and they incorporate into their work. It’s been argued—and convincingly so—that the pioneers of dubstream have picked up where Leon Theremin left off, only with a greater level of success. In fact, some of my favorite ‘stream songs have included instruments such as broken microwaves, broken refrigerators, broken trash compactors, broken garage doors, broken printers, broken scanners, broken fax machines, broken answering machines, broken tape players, broken tape recorders, broken alarm clocks, broken computers, broken smart phones, broken hard drives, broken televisions, broken wireless internet routers, unreliable fan belts, spastic rotors, faulty central heating, malfunctioning children’s toys and an iPad dropped in a bathtub. All of these photoelectrical elements come together to fashion a distinct sonic landscape, like the grim battlefield of recent war between your household appliances. And the DJ—that bold mastermind behind the dubstream—captures the death rattles of those machines, commiting their malfunctionings to a form of aural history not to be forgotten.

Past the immediate innovations of ‘stream music, however, there is also the intellectual movement to which it has given rise. My favorite critical responses are those that investigate dubstream as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, such as “The Art of the Drop: A Newtonian Investigation into the Classical Behavior of Falling Objects in Dubstream Music” by Dr. Schryll Ecks, Ph.D. of the Harvard University Department of Physics and “Surviving the Drop: Multiple Recovery Pathways in the Wake of Dubstream-Induced Cardiac Arrest” by Dr. A. Veechi, MD, of the Italian Federation of Cardiology. And, Duke University’s very own film and lit aficionado T. Esto has published extensively on what he refers to as “‘stream punk,” a new cinematic and literary genre emerging in simultaneity with its musical counterpart.

The dubstream revolution has been total: the brightest amongst us have redefined not only what it is to listen to music, but also what it means to recycle a defunct cell phone. This radical restructuring of the once attenuated link between Hot Topic and Office Max can’t pass unnoticed. I have faith it won’t, and that others, in finding it as abrasive to their sense of artistry as I do, will take notice next time one of their electronic devices malfunctions.