Okay, if you follow electronic rhetoric you’ve probably heard all the whining of how mainstream it’s become over the last few years. It’s gotten to the point where I cannot help but distinguish the mainstream stuff as BROstep so as to not tarnish the creativity and history of what Dubstep is about.

As jaded as I am, even I’m tired of everyone bashing on it being popular. This has happened before to electronic genres: going from an underground scene with an intense creativity and dedication, the sound blowing up and becoming popular internationally, a flood of talented and derivative producers making their own take on it, some pop cross-over… from there it usually fades out, with originators and innovators keeping on doing what they’ve always loved as the focus moves onto something else.

The degree of the fade away belies how much the genre tapped into the fashion of the era, and how much it forged new musical territory allowing persistence in the EDM biosphere.

Examples:
..Electroclash – cashed in on the 80s revival, short-lived in the spotlight, but got all the way into the pop realm more than most EDM genres since the 80s themselves, until dubstep
..Drum & Bass – was around for many years before blowing up, derided the mainstream as Clownstep, but is still going strong, with new directions and keeping up the old now that it’s out of the spotlight. The directions it took us in bass synths have persisted and continued to evolve though, which influenced dubstep and electrohouse

As for dubstep and brostep, I expect we’ll see a few more years of it in the spotlight, which has it’s good and bad. As a genre, I think it’s wonderful. We’ve never before in the history of humanity had the ability to make such incredible, varied bass synths that take over the entire song: melody, rhythm. The parallels in tempo to dub, r&b, house, techno and d&b have allowed a lot of cross-pollination, making the whole genre of music difficult to refer to as just dubstep anymore. Similar to the way Techno exploded to mean all types of EDM and has since returned to the more narrow definition of that seed, the styles, subgenres and offshoots will become definable in their own right. Because we cannot call something post-dubstep forever (insert post-modern diatribe here).

So has brostep jumped the shark? To the purists and the jaded, yes it has. To those going nuts in clubs and selling records, no keep it coming. Luckily sharks and dubstep are complementary imagery, so if it wants to eat itself with rows of gnashing teeth and spit out babies of rhythmically interesting, hyper-sound design bass monsters… we’re all ears.