Now, I don’t make these types of calls often as I hate coming across as a wanky music journalist, but it’s not very often these days you witness the birth of a movement of fresh sounding music. Sure, there are sub-genres of the popular standards that do very well and can sometimes evolve their own scene, as witnessed with “emo”. And there is music that simply sounds like older music, like “nu-gaze” which imitates and expands the genre a little but keeps so much essence of the original to be unoriginal in and of itself.
But it’s my opinion that Dubstep is a new form of music, different enough from its roots to be its own genre, and fresh enough from all the other music out there to not be a subgenre of something else. Although it has been around for a number of years, Dubsteps roots lie in UK dance genres Garage and Drum & Bass, but the music expands from its influences so much that it finds a wider and different audience, and is becoming more popular outside its UK homeland, expanding its reach into Europe, America and Australia.
One of its leading lights is Beni Uthman, better known as DJ Benga, a South London DJ who along with DJ Skream is at the forefront of the Dubstep movement. Uthman started off mixing Garage from an early age, but also listened to a lot of Drum & Bass. “I never really had a preference – I liked everything. When I started mixing it wasn’t because I liked garage more,” he explains, “it was because I had more garage around me at the time. All my brothers were MCs, and would MC to garage, and that’s how I got into it.”
He also got a lot of help from the guys at Big Apple Records in Croydon, South London, his home town. “Whenever I went in there when I was younger they were like “can you DJ, can you really DJ?” and I could. I remember one time it was quite late and it was shutting hours, so I said to them let me have a mix. So they let me have a mix and they were shocked because I was only 12 or 13! I could barely reach the top of the counter,” Uthman laughs. “They came out and saw me DJ out as well and were so impressed they gave me sponsorship and that,” he smiles.
Knowing the sounds he liked, they helped Uthman find tunes with the subbass and broken beats he liked. This was found mostly on B-Sides of garage and grime tunes, but wasn’t exactly to his liking. He had a passion for the darker sounds of drum and bass, but loved the dance beat of garage, and couldn’t find exactly the sound he wanted to play on other people’s records so with DJ Skream he started producing his own material, releasing tunes on the ‘Big Apple Records’ label. “My sound, I would say,” he muses, “come from drum and bass style synths, drum and bass style baselines, with a garage tempo drums. Because of my UK garage influences I have the rolling drums, but I still have that half-time beat… with a little bit of techno in there as well,” he chuckles.
Radio has been very important in promoting dubstep to a wider audience. BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs championed the sound on her show ‘Dubstep Warz’ in 2006, and Skream’s own show ‘Stella Sessions’ on the infamous pirate radio station Rinse FM also fills the airwaves with the subbase synonymous with dubstep. But it also reaches a global audience via the internet. “When people couldn’t lock into a show, barefiles would host it so they could download it at any time,” Uthman says, talking about www.barefiles.com, the probably-not-legal website which hosts radio shows from around the UK. “Because of this, I’d go to Amsterdam, and be shocked because the people would know the songs I was playing. I expected to have to warm them into it, but they already knew what was big and that sort of thing.”
It’s Uthmans first time to Australia, and he’s looking forward to coming. Being the first dubstep international to play Adelaide, he’s especially keen to pop our dubstep cherry. “I remember Skream (who’s played in Australia but not Adelaide) telling me the people are really friendly and the scene will get bigger and better because the people really love bassline. Bassline’s an international language,” he laughs, “Everyone loves bassline, innit?”
Benga plays at Rhino Room on Sat 8 Sep alongside DJs Jayar, Stagga4wrd, Bennie Raw, Macro & Audioopticon