My dear readers, as any of you know, there is an aural plague bit by bit, infesting our nation, growing ever-larger one person at a time. It’s wub-wub-filled thumping is more tortuous to a sound mind than a chorus of demons, and yet this maddening melody grows ever louder. As any one who has set foot in a high school or college campus knows, this musical menace is known as dubstep.

According to Wikipedia, dupstep originated in southern London, which from my limited understanding of the area as an American living on the opposite side of the ocean, I can only assume is where the British equivalents of Hipsters reside. Created almost entirely by computer-based sound-editing programs, and as such, takes next to no musical talent to create, almost every single track consists of barely distinguishable sound effects and base drops. Tragically, like many other international horrors like the vuvuzela or tentacle porn, it spread it’s way to mainstream popularity by means of certain masochistic sub-cultures, much to the annoyance of the majority of the population with decent tastes in cultural tastes.

As you might have guessed from my tone, I am not a fan. And not just because I’m tired of random idiots at school running up to me with a set of headphones telling me “Listen to that bass dude. It’s so dirty. Wait for the drop. Here it comes—wait, wait—yes. Uuunnnngh. That drop is so nasty.” To be fair, nasty and dirty are both appropriate adjectives for the genre.

This throbbing and abrasive affront to music at least to me has always sounded like Optimus Prime getting raped as compared to actual music. In every track I’ve had the misfortune to hear – it seems like it’s fans like to play it on their speakers load enough for me to hear half a parking lot away – there is no melody, no musical instruments, no lyrics or anything technically musical about dubstep. It’s just a bunch of of bass drops with that signature wob-wob-wob repeated in every single track, typically played at volumes loud enough to shatter glass – and typically give me a headache in the process.

The annoying music is only compounded by the annoying fan base, which has to be one of pop culture’s most pretentious, extolling the virtues of this ‘genre’ at any provided opportunity. While I’m sure there are some people who legitimately like dubstep, the vast majority that I’ve encountered aren’t in it for the music. You have the preppy scene kids who like it because it’s the ‘in’ thing at the moment. Then you have the junkies who listen to it while stoned for the sensory overload that follows, that or found murdering their brain cells a preferable alternative to listening to dubstep. The last, and worst of the bunch, are the hipsters, which in hindsight makes perfect sense. After all, what is more essentially hipsterish than crappy underground music so bad it makes otherwise rational people want to gouge out their eardrums?

At least in my opinion though, the worst part about dubstep is just how artificial and fake it is. Those words tend to get tossed around a lot with bad music, to the point I feel they’ve lost there original meaning to a lot of people. At least to me, music should always be about the human element of the equation, about the musician slaving over their strings and songs, pouring their passion into the music in hopes that an audience will share that same passion. It should take heart, drive, and above all else, talent to make a musician and music. That’s one of the reason’s I detest pop music as much as I do, as so much of it these days has lost that human element, where computers and auto-tune are increasingly the means of the genre. The less of that musicians touch, the more artificial and fake the music is.

Dupstep is about as artificial and fake as music can be before it devolves into just noise. For all of it’s wub-laden bass lines and drops, in a typical dubstep track, there’s no melody, no lyrics, no tune, no song, and no music. It’s just a bunch of sound effects that anyone with a decent editing program on their computer can piece together and wait for the first idiot on a meth high on to declare it ‘nasty’. There’s no heart, no song, no music, no soul in the entire genre. It’s a tune for the tasteless, a melody for the mindless, background noise for all of those who do not wish to trouble themselves with genuine music.

Some like minded critics of have likened dubstep to this generation’s disco, and there is some merit in this comparison, seeing as they are both crappy passing fad sub-genre’s that only appeal for the most part to junkies and hippies/hipsters. However, I feel it doesn’t truly capture it fully, as even disco, in all it’s horror, could still qualify as music, while dubstep barely qualifies as an extended sound effect. No, dubstep is to music what Holy Virgin Mary was to art; an attempt by some talent-less losers to degrade an entire art form to the point of bunch of imbeciles will consider fecal matter ‘culture’, and at least in my opinion, the sooner we stop letting the junkies and hipsters pollute the airwaves with this crap, the better.