James Blake by James Blake

Released on ATLAS, supported by A&M Records, on 4 February 2011

Artist: James Blake
Genre: Post-dubstep, R&B, Experimental Electronic

      Here’s an experiment. Tell a group of people that you like dubstep, and see how quickly it takes for someone to profess their hatred for the genre. They say that dubstep is just electronic noise without any substance. The DJs (or “DJs” depending on how you look at them) just endlessly remix songs with these noises stripping out the parts of the songs that made them great in the first place. And the concerts are just kids taking drugs in front of a guy with his Macbook hooked up to concert speakers. When SNL makes these claims you can probably assume that the idea has seeped into the public consciousness.
     I actually don’t disagree with a lot of the generalizations that people tend to make about the music they are hearing from these artists. There is a culture surrounding the music that makes it difficult to separate the music from the rest of the practices. HOWEVER, even though this music is dubstep it is JUST ONE subgenere. This music is a type of Americanized dubstep known primarily as “Brostep.” If you are counting out a whole genre because of the loud minority then you are going to miss out.
     Dubstep originated out of UK EDM and garage dance, and is often categorized by several interesting features including brominate sub bass frequencies and syncopated percussions. From that basic blueprint the genre started to merge with other dance genres like dub, reggae, jungle and 2-step and branch out. Starting around 2003 radios started to play dubstep tracks and small labels started to sign many new artists. Around 2011 we started to see many post-dubstep genres including brostep. Though I might not be enamored with the American part of the genre there are a lot of fantastic artists that deserve to be judged on their own merits. Which brings me to this week’s artist.
     James Blake’s music is certainly not something you would want to dance to. His music encompasses aspects of classical piano, R&B and Soul as well as experimental electronic music. His music is very repetitive and usually relies on very little instrumentation. He takes these simple parts, and builds them up into a crescendo. While many other artists in the genre are very aggressive with noise Blake chooses his sounds sparingly, laying them all out so the listener can appreciate each one. His self-titled debut album earned him a lot of critical acclaim including a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
     Hopefully this has been informative to some of you. I’m not saying that you should now love dubstep, but next time someone says they like dubstep maybe ask them what kinds of artists they like before you tell them how much you dislike a whole genre of music.