This is what’s considered good

DubstepStory by George Buckleton & Mike Atkins

Wheel 21st EditionFri 18th June at Zen

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In front of me are guys in sideways baseball hats and flipped collars dancing. Behind me are semi-well-dressed people standing stock-still. The venue is divided between the two groups like the boys and girls at a school disco. Those behind me are have their eyes front-and-centre, as if they are waiting to see something happen. A lot is in fact happening, but very little of it is visual, and yet these people are staring at a man playing records. -Which is what DJs do; They don’t perform in a visual/physical sense (though, it is a performance). Granted, the last DJ before this one was moving around a lot, but that was because he was just that into it. It was not to entertain (because honestly, he actually looks a bit silly).

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George, the photographer, helpfully informs me that tonight’s performance is what’s considered “good dubstep”. I’m glad to know that my perception coincides with an insider’s received wisdom. It’s the genre that I’d have been unsure of were he not there. I’d have guessed “minimal trance”, but that would be a guess based on the sound of words that I’d heard on Bfm. The starers are either mingled, or gone now; though, I’m guessing the latter. Their presence, especially in such large numbers, is a mystery that will never be solved now that they are no longer evident. Their only remnant is a girl in a white tank top, and hippie pants (I don’t know why, but the presence of hippies subconsciously signifies musical legitimacy for me). As well as staring, she’s doing that weird hippie dance where you move your arms like a slow-motion tombola while slowly swaying, and she’s the only one here that’s interesting to look at. But that’s a good thing. You don’t come to these things for people watching, but that’s an idea that I (and, I suspect, the starers) are just getting used to. So, I suppose, I’ll talk about the music instead.

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“Talk”. -That‘s a weird word to use. When I was a teenager, one of my favourite activities was to get stoned, with my friend and watch Starship Troopers really closely, looking for (mostly imagined) anti-fascist subtexts. We theorised that the way that the characters refer to recording video messages for each other as “writing letters” signified they are illiterate. I wonder if I’m doing the same thing in reverse. Am I hyper-literate? Is that a thing? This causes me to wonder if anyone has taken any drugs that can give off a contact high. Maybe someone’s taken so much acid that they’re sweating acid, and that person brushed against me.

Nah. -That would have given the starers something to stare at.

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Ahem. Right. The music. A sign of musical quality is the ability to do a lot with a very limited palette. Just under an hour of glassy metallic squeals and grunts over a heavy beat has so far failed to get repetitive. It’s a different story at Fu. The DJ there has got old quite quickly. Maybe it’s something that would grow on me though I don’t really have the patience to give him a chance. Zen is the place to be for instant gratification.

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I’m sitting under a UV light, and writing on a white sheet with a black pen. The UV light makes the page glow, and the letters appear to hover about an inch above the page. I don’t dance, so I’m perfectly happy sitting here, grooving along, and enjoying the letters on the page. George takes a break from taking pictures and comes to sit next to me. Dubstep being a gap in my musical knowledge, I ask, “What makes this dubstep”? “It’s that wobble in the bass” he says. I’d given up on the idea of scenes, but George says that this is the dubstep community that’s come out for this night. That’s nice, -not just a scene, but a community. I feel less less responsibility now to reportage, since

this is something that will exist long after me. -It’s not something happening at a particular time and place, which needs reporting on for posterity.

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