Or subtitled “Oh! So that’s what Dubstep is, then.”

I should come clean: Although my last.fm profile says I like Annie Mac (which I do) I haven’t regularly listened to her radio show for about seven years when it was on a Thursday evening (or something like that). It just doesn’t fit in with home life. I do however listen to the minimix podcasts all the time and the Annie Mac Presents albums get some serious repeat listens. But otherwise I’m very much not down with the kids.

And so it was that one weekend I was making my way through a list of possibly interesting music (mainly collated from TLOBF) on Spotify, most of it being rubbish or not on there, and I got to Pariah and the Safehouses EP. It sounded ok-ish from a quick listen (it can be difficult to gauge with a background of prattle about horses, ponies, pandas and unicorns) so I saved that for a proper listen on Monday at work: Crossed out is good. So is Prism. Definite highlights. The last song is just unnerving noise.

Having a bit of a search for Pariah I found the Guardian New Band of the Day entry (which means I’m at least four months behind the times already) and learnt that Pariah is Dubstep. I’d wondered for quite a while exactly what counted as Dubstep (there is no handy genre card to accompany the Annie Mac presents albums like there is for flavours of chocolates in box of Quality Street). I guess I could have searched sooner and found this massive entry on Wikipedia and also discovered there is even an entire forum dedicated to the genre.

I apply my genre’s with a wide brush stroke:

  • Indie
  • Alternative (And for my purposes I could probably combine this with the above as per Rock/Metal, etc below)
  • Hip-Hop
  • Rock/Metal
  • Punk/Ska
  • Electronica/Dance

So, of course, Pariah has been filed away under Electronica/Dance and I see no reason to complicate things further.

Anyway, apparently Dub Step is already dead, but I doubt it really is. Neither is Rock for that matter, it - like any other genre of music - has just evolved a bit and got a hip new name for a new genre-ation.