Diplo, Various - Blow Your Head – Diplo Presents Dubstep

Dubstep is sort of a great nephew to Reggae. Pick up the family album from Reggae’s yearly barbecue & you see that Reggae has a kid called Dancehall, & a grandson named Jungle. Then its brother is a strange old man named Dub that had a bastard kid who ran away to do drugs in London & start a band with no money, just a laptop with a few cracked programs it found on torrent sites.
Never has there been a musical movement that grew so simultaneously in a global way. You can thank the internet for creating this atmosphere; parties & crews of producers grow together from New Zealand to Tokyo, Tel Aviv to London, India, Romania, Philly, Vancouver, & Buenos Aires. Dubstep is leaning equally on all these loose influenced & ingredients – you have Melodic, Ambient, Punk, House, Dancehall, Pop, Industrial, & Techno, all while keeping the bass mix LOUD... so loud it might break things. So much bass that my first time I went to DMZ in Brixton I had to cover my ears. The low end was so sharp I thought I might have brain damage. I imagined I was in a club under the basement of where the resistance had their weekly dirty meetings after meals of rat soup & moldy bread in the Terminator movies... I felt like an old man!
If these kids saw me on the street they might cut me to pieces & feed me to their computers. But I loved it for this. I love it for the baffling characters that played in these parties – Skream, Benga, Loefah, Kode9. These guys I thought were like lil neo-Basquiats that were speaking in a language no one understood yet. I loved it because Dubstep is unassuming, grimey & doesn’t have any set of rules. Today was an homage to rave pianos, tomorrow we incorporate vocoders, Balkan samples, Classic Rock, it doesn’t matter, you just gave to move me & surprise me more than the last record. And maybe get a few screams.
Sure you have your purists here & there, but they don’t really have a say anymore. Dubstep was always something that wasn’t contained; the older they get... the younger the audience for it gets, & those kids want it even louder & weirder. I don’t think there’s another genre that has ever been this immediate & it’s run completely by the producers. Everyone else has a back seat & we watch it move in hyper-speed.

Diplo, June 20, 2010

TRACKLISTING:

1. Re-Up – Joker & Ginz
2. Hold The Line (Skream Remix) – Major Lazer feat. Mr Lexx & Santigold
3. Down - DZ
4. U Don’t Like Me (Datsik Remix) – Diplo feat. Lil Jon
5. Strange Fruit - Zomby
6. Glazed - Brackles
7. Burn (Stenchman Remix) – Jessica Mauboy
8. Sweet Shop – Doctor P
9. Cockney Thug (Caspa Remix) - Rusko
10. Stop What You’re Doing (James Blake Remix) - Untold
11. Sunset – Borgore feat. Diplo
12. Sparing The Horse – James Blake
13. 26 Basslines - Benga
14. Youth Blood (12th Planet & Flinch Remix) – Little Jinder
15. Resealable Friendship (Starkey Remix) – Rudi Zygadlo
16. Hold On (Subfocus Remix) – Rusko feat. Amber Coffman                                                                                                                    

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!