“Who gon stop me,” from Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne, begins with an orbiting, distorted vocal sample, then explodes into a rush of quaking bottom-end and pulsating, chunky mid-range. These are the blatant hallmarks of dubstep, the floor-shaking, multifaceted electronic music that began on South London pirate radio nearly a decade ago and now peppers U.S.

If you’re looking for a bellwether moment to signal this genre’s American takeover, you could do worse. “Who Gon Stop Me” won’t break dubstep, though, because dubstep, depending on your perspective, already has arrived broken, dead, or unrecognizable.

Serial Stories Lady Swings Dead there. Similarly, recent dubstep-inflected pop tracks by Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, and Korn are mile markers, not destinations. This is, in part, because American audiences and artists are caught in a geographical divide that has fractured the genre’s identity. “The stuff that’s popular in America is different than the London dubstep sound,” explains Drew Best, cofounder of Los Angeles-based Smog, one of America’s first dubstep parties. “The scene in America is massive. It’s way bigger than it is in the U.K.” This massiveness is a tribute to the music’s power, but also to the support of Best, along with scene starters like New York’s Dave Q and Joe Nice, and the Bay Area’s Nick Argon and Bassnectar. Dubstep may be the closest British analog to American hip-hop (though drum and bass and grime traditionally have played that role), with its sonic upheaval, aggressive posturing, and intense debate about the music’s origins and true nature.

Roughly, dubstep began as a reaction to U.K. Bebop Licks Guitar Pdf To Adam. Garage music, itself an innovative, underground club movement that had been polished to a pop sheen. Artists such as Horsepower Productions, El-B, and Digital Mystikz slowed the sound way down while looking to dub reggae’s dystopian worldview for inspiration. Influential DJs (the BBC’s John Peel and Mary Anne Hobbs) and stations (Rinse FM) spread the sound to a wider audience. By the time dubstep crested in the U.K. In 2006, it was already rebelling against itself. Spare, moody subwoofer odysseys by Burial, Kode9, and Shackleton gave way to artists such as Skream, Caspa, and Rusko, who produced booming, disorienting tracks stuffed with jagged keyboard riffs.

The music was still slow, but also intense and active, and more appealing to American teenagers raised on rock radio. It’s a sound that Caspa calls “noisy, mid-range-tearing-through-the-system dubstep. Americans like it pretty hard.” For producers, this iteration of dubstep was fresh and exciting, but it was also convenient — tempos and textures aligned nicely with current rap tracks, particularly from the South, which blasted blocky synth melodies that seemed to split the difference between metal and techno. “Wobble,” as it came to be known for its oscillating bass, could rattle ribs in dingy clubs, festival tents, or on the radio. “If you listen to the metal, aggro stuff, you don’t need a good sound system to impact people,” says Starkey, one of the first American producers to incorporate the sound. Club nights began bubbling up: Smog in Los Angeles and Dub War in New York. Britney took her first stab at the genre back in 2007 (“Freakshow,” which she followed up this year with “Hold It Against Me”), and soon U.K.

Artists like Rusko, Chase & Status, and Nero were producing tracks for major pop acts. The large outdoor festival circuit converted groups of sweaty adolescents. “I started turning to festivals that were usually associated with jam bands,” says Bassnectar. “Not because I liked the jam-band music, but because in America that’s where youth culture would go to experience frenzied music gatherings.” Live events became a focus of the U.S. Scene, and if explosive, breakdown-oriented artists like 12th Planet and Flinch don’t inspire much dancing, they inspire the next best thing: appreciative, orgiastic headbanging.