It's a battle of the offbeat titans!
Two British-borne genres with heavily syncopated rhythms and unusual flows will fight it out in this blog - who will be the winner?
In the red corner we have relative newcomer Dubstep, weighing in heavily with its iconic wobble basslines since the early 2000s.
In the blue corner we have Trip Hop, the older and wiser genre, weighing in with its apathetic, heavy beats since the early 1990s.
Let the battle commence!
Roots
As with many electronic music genres, we must venture to England to find the start of both of these genres.
Trip Hop has a 10 year head start on Dubstep - an offshoot of the Hip Hop phenomenon breaking out of America at the time, Bristol Producers decided to take influence from downtempo dub music and apply it to the loop-based Hip Hop to spawn their own genre.
Trip Hop was born! The style evolved throughout the '90s - starting out as a genre based around unusual samples, eerie strings and slow beats, with artists such as DJ Shadow acting as proponents for the genre.
'95 passed and it progressed further; the character of the genre became more distinct, as artists like Portishead and Tricky put their own slants on it, bringing melancholic vocals and syncopated scratching to add to the rickety percussion.
The genre tended towards a dark, morbid sound, but as the late 90s went past, people started bringing in elements of more upbeat genres like Drum n' Bass to the mixing pot, and using other vocal styles with the genre.
2000 goes past and we can jump on the Dubstep bandwagon...
Boundary-Pushing UK Garage producers trying to explore the darker side of the genre were the pioneers of Dubstep. Bringing the heavy bass and drums from Drum and Bass and adding dissonant, painful synths and samples over the top, the Dubstep genre was born.
Unlike Trip Hop, Dubstep garnered an intense club following - people would increasingly go out to Dubstep nights to experience the massive basslines and entrancing rhythms in the manner they were intended. As a result of this, Dubstep tends to be more structured than Trip Hop, so DJs can mix it into their sets more easily.
A typical Dubstep song will comprise an intro, a drop into the chorus, a verse/break, drop into another chorus and another verse/break into the outro, to keep the DJ happy. The length of these sections is up to the producer, however.
Dubstep has kept its iconic wobble bass, but similar to trip hop, several years after its inception, it has been taken in all different directions, with DJs like Skream taking it down the darker route with excessive reverb, repetition and delay and Rusko taking it along a more fun, club-friendly path with silly sounding synths, upbeat melodies and bouncy rhythms.
So now we know where they came from, how about we find out where they're going?
Trip Hop remains in the public's eye with the pioneering bands like Portishead and Massive Attack still going strong, but the scene appears to have died down as of late.
As happens with a lot of genres as they grow up, Trip Hop has had kids - Sub genres such as Illbient and Post Trip Hop have carried on the legacy of the genre into more specific pathways. Will these genres bring the experimentation and sullen feel of Trip Hop back into the limelight?
Dubstep, however, is still on the rise. In fact, with big time artists like Snoop Dogg and Public Enemy taking an interest in the genre, is it just a matter of time before it achieves some major mainstream success?
Lastly, let's take a look at their similarities and differences.
Both genres are undeniably about keeping things syncopated - offbeat and unusual. They can both invoke dark emotions but are also able to bring completely different feelings with to direction of the right producer.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference is the harshness of a lot of Dubstep - while Trip Hop tends to be more ambient, Dubstep's in-your-face LFO filtered basslines are less than subtle, perhaps making it a more intense genre rather than something you can chill out to.
This is not to say that there is no chillout dubstep or in-your-face trip hop - both genres certainly have versatility, which may have attributed to the success they have achieved.
But which is the victor? Which genre has been more successful? The relatively youthful Dubstep or the Wisened old Trip Hop?
Well, to answer that I guess you should ask yourself - which would you rather make?
