It’s been a weird couple of years for Dubstep. There have been highs and lows and depending on what’s important to you and how you measure them you can pretty much just switch them around.

Need an example?

Let’s take Magnetic Man. Pretty cool project from the outside. You’ve got scene stalwarts Skream, Benga and Artwork working together. Guys who have known each other for years, over a decade, a walking advertisement for the sense of family that can exist within the odd world of underground electronica. Each one as an individual has done so much for the scene and now, as a group they have signed to a major and cracked the top 10 in the UK charts with “I Need Air”.

The bad side of things? They cracked the top 10 in the UK charts with “I Need Air”. It’s not, for me, a good song. Given some of the tracks that this trio have provided over the last 10 years one could venture the thought that is possibly contains an aesthetic that was specifically chosen to provide some mainstream success.

So there is one example, two sides of the same coin, the ying and the yang, the good and the bad. And this year has just been nuts. The entire Dubstep scene discovered that they were completely wrong about the place of Croydon, Garage and Plastic People in the development of Dubstep as a sound. Big Apple Records doesn’t even get a look in now that Jonathan Davis of nu-mental’s most long lived band Korn revealed to the world that they, in fact, were Dubstep long before there was ever Dubstep. So jump back El-B and Horsepower, Mr Davis had this covered, you had an hand in originating absolutely nothing.

The Godfather of...wait...what?

We’ve got Sonny Moore (he has another name that i won’t use…I reckon most of his fans don’t know his real name and can’t pronounce his stage name anyway but i’m just not that much of a Google Search whore) being nominated for a Grammy…which largely goes to prove two things. The first being that commercial success is the only worthwhile success and the second being that the Grammy’s are about as relevant to music as Freud’s theories of psychosexual development are to modern day Psychoanalysis. That is to say, they used to mean something, now they don’t mean anything at all.

We’ve got Justin Bieber talking about experimenting with Dubstep sounds, we’ve got the aforementioned Korn making a “dubstep” album and we’ve got endless evidence of the sticky decaying tentacles of the mainstream plundering the scene to sell everything from Britney Spears tracks to Weetabix.

It’s weird times folks…I haven’t checked my Mayan Calendar lately but if i was in a certain mood i might imagine a few of these things as being indicators of the coming End of Days. And there has been a whole lot of talking being done online about the whole scenario. People are pissed off, they feel as if their space is being invaded and that their hero’s are being insulted as the hipster kids latch on to brostep (it’s angry and confused and only does one thing…so it’s not a real mystery as to why the younger generation are falling in love with it), memes abound (my favourite being the oddly ironic indication that Dubstep used to be a sausage fest but these days you might just get laid at a Dubstep gig and not have to swear off MDMA the following day while repeating the age old urban legend that “MDMA brings out the gay” like a mantra). Dubstep initial refusal to be quantified (or perhaps the clever refusal of those early innovators to worry about quantifying what they were doing ) grew into a highly developmental and experimental scene that spawned the FWD sound, the brostep sound and the whole kaleidoscope of sounds that people will insist on calling “Post-Dubstep”. Even Burial’s loose affiliation with Dubstep (the fact that he released on Hyperdub and they sometimes do Dubstep tracks) spawned a rebirth and evolution in Garage…and with that the weird cycle was complete.

Garage birthed Dubstep which, in some weird twisted Oedipus moment then gave birth to it’s own mother in the form of Future-Garage. Strange right?

So what do you do? Do you duck and cover, cowering beneath your DJ table clutching you copies of early DMZ and Tempa releases? Not really. The often used line that Dubstep is dead is, quite frankly, complete and utter rubbish. It’s an understandable line to take when you think that Beliebers might just be brocking out to a nasty drop next summer but it’s not the only course of action.

For solace, just look back to the birth of Dubstep, an equal and opposite reaction to the perceived death of Garage. We’ve got all the same trends happening now that happened then. Commercial tunes, awful vocals, general trance vibes, style over substance etc etc. The only thing we are missing is our So Solid Crew…and despite my dislike of “I Need Air” i just can’t see Artwork and the guys getting done for possession of a firearm or starting a donnybrook.

There have been some monumental tunes released this year, some amazing producers doing fantastic work. Listen to the below and tell me that old vibe is dead.

You’ve got people all over the world promoting good music, good artists and great gigs. You’ve got labels like Black Box/Box Clever, Deep Medi, Tempa, Keysound and many others continuing to release tunes with those deep, deep subs and wide open spaces that dominated the early days of Dubstep. Then you’ve got the Hessle’s, Hemlock’s, Numbers and Hyperdubs who continue to push things in new and interesting directions.

We’ve had stunning albums from SBTRKT, Rustie, LV, Sully, Kode 9 and Spaceape, Sepalcure and many more.

It’s a foolish notion to think that Dubstep is dead, or even dying. It’s not. It’s just the first prominant genre to occur during the computer age and it’s apparent birth, growth, expansion and death have already occurred at an accelerated rate and will continue to occur over and over again…because that’s the weird place that music is right now.

If you want my advice, rather than playing duck and cover because the same thing is happening now that has always happened to music, you should start a club night, or a label, or crack open the DAW and write a tune or go digging through your stacks and have a good mix. Hell, maybe even take a stroll down to the local record shop and part with cash for musical bliss and support the producers and labels you feel deserve it.

Dubstep isn’t dead, it’s still alive, it’s still relevant and it’s still exciting and there is still room for a lot of important things to happen and it’s really up to us as to how involved we are in it.

So chins up kids, it’s really not as bad as it seems.