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Abstract
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [Citation2004]. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with making changes.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Jack Latham for his time, generosity and invaluable insights into the themes of this article. I would also like to thank Georgina Born, Kyle Devine, Cinnamon Ducasse, Blake Durham, Adam Harper, Tim Lawrence, Freya Johnson Ross, Merijn Royaards, Johnny Stirling and the anonymous reviewers from Contemporary Music Review for their astute comments and support.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
[1] The key genres that Latham and I discussed were grime and dubstep, which emerged in the early 2000s in London, as well as their legacies ‘post-dubstep', ‘bass music' and ‘new grime'. Both dubstep and grime drew influence from dub, jungle, drum ’n’ bass and UK garage, and both initially operated through an infrastructure of small club nights and pirate radio, with much cross-over between artists and ideas. But whereas dubstep evolved into an instrumental music in which MCs played a subordinate role to DJs, grime elevated MCs to centre stage, precipitating the genre’s close affiliation with rap, battles and crews. Although dubstep and grime were both overtly male-dominated, the focus of my analysis is dubstep since––due to its lack of the ‘gang-related’ stigma of MC culture––it had an enduring presence in clubs in ways that grime did not, because grime events were perpetually closed down by the police.
[2] Following Born, a ‘musical assemblage’ can be defined as a constellation of aesthetic, social, spatial, discursive and technological mediations that, through mutually catalysing interactions, cohere into a particular historical shape (Born, Citation2005; cf. DeLanda, Citation2006; Deleuze, Citation1988/Citation2006).
[3] See http://www.ilovefwd.com/, and http://www.dmzuk.com/.
[4] US dubstep emerged with the global explosion of UK dubstep (2006–2007), and involved increasing amounts of ‘wobble’, distortion and mid-range frequencies. Many in the UK were critical of this, claiming—as Reynolds and Blake do—that the sound became overdriven, aggressive and ‘bro-step’. Yet, as I pursue later, it was this transition to the mainstream (both in the UK and US) that brought more women into dubstep crowds, not less.
[5] Jungle emerged from hardcore and dancehall in London in the early 1990s. The term drum ’n’ bass arose in the mid-late 1990s when jungle lost its dancehall influences (notably toasting: see note 9), transitioning to an instrumental music. Garage emerged in the late 1990s, reintroducing vocals/MCs.
[6] On the basis of fieldwork, I conceive of musical ‘affect’ as an ambivalent ‘threshold condition’ that is personal, social–cultural and historical, as well as psychically ‘volatile’ (Grosz, Citation1994; cf. Blackman, Citation2012). It is thus capable of both reproducing social relations of difference (e.g. gender) and initiating detachment from them (cf. Hemmings, Citation2005). This empirically derived theory of affect sits between neo-Deleuzian affect theorists, who understand Deleuzian ontology as empirical reality, and feminist and critical race affect theorists, who piercingly challenge the ethics and integrity of the neo-Deleuzian approach, but whose work can border on social determinism.
[7] Roots reggae emerged in the 1970s. Dub is a subgenre of roots reggae, also pioneered in the 1970s and characterised by the deconstruction of reggae songs to create dub ‘versions’ using techniques of fragmentation, reverb and the dissipation/reinterpretation of vocals. I use the term ‘dub reggae’ to refer to the roots reggae and dub movement.
[8] For dub-influenced dubstep, listen to ‘Anti-War Dub’ and ‘Jah Fire’ by Digital Mystikz.
[9] Fast-chat was an English take on the Jamaican dancehall aesthetic of ‘toasting’—improvised rapping over bass lines—and was central to jungle.
[10] As Barry Chevannes establishes, the Rastafari dreadlocks phenomenon ‘symbolized both a rejection of social control … [and] a triumph of male power over the female’ (Citation1995, p. 97). While Rastafari was different in the UK than it was/is in Jamaica—often more stylistically and politically oriented than religious—negative ideas about women also informed British Rastafarianism, particularly the more theological strands (cf. Gilroy, Citation1982b).
[11] On the values of ‘reputation’ and ‘respectability’ see Wilson (Citation1995), Besson (Citation1993, Citation2002).
[12] In their search for new (female) artists, Dennis Harris, Coxsone and others involved in the Lovers’ Rock label employed a standard Jamaican studio strategy of holding weekly open auditions.
[13] This reading of dancehall in the diaspora as a feminised space draws on Cooper (Citation2004). As she notes, women’s preference for the sexualised spaces of dancehall in Jamaica seems to stem from a desire to empower and celebrate the black female body, women’s sexuality and fertility (Cooper, 2004, p. 17). Rather than dancehall condoning patriarchy through female objectification, as critics suggest, Cooper’s view is that––in both Jamaica and the diaspora––dancehall offers a radical, liberating space for women.
[14] In his update chapter for the 2013 edition of Energy Flash, Reynolds redresses his previous statements about bro-step, observing that: ‘although nu-dubstep has a macho reputation, there're plenty of girls on the dancefloor' (Reynolds, 2013, p. 683).
[15] There are exceptions, notably nights hosted by Steve Goodman aka Kode 9’s label Hyperdub, which attract very mixed gender (and mixed race) crowds—possibly attributable to the label’s dancehall influences, as well as the many female artists on its roster.
[16] A phrase taken from the music video to Latham’s track ‘Unhappy’, which he often repeats in interviews with music journalists.