Everything the Bass Drop Is Saying

The lyrical content of dubstep is, broadly, equivalent to a sentence spoken by someone whose jaw has been replaced with a car stereo. There are words in there somewhere—you can sometimes catch a syllable surfacing above the low-end—but what the vocalist is actually communicating matters far less than the fact that they’re making sounds with their face while the bass does whatever it wants. This is not a complaint. The wub-wub-wub-SKREE of the drop communicates something real; it just communicates it at a frequency you feel before you hear. Lyrics would only be in the way.

What’s interesting about electronic music that pushes language to the margins is what it reveals about what we actually want from a voice in music. Mostly, it turns out, we want texture. A body in the room. The semantic content—the actual words—matters far less than sixty years of singer-songwriters have led us to believe. Dubstep is unusually honest about this. The voice becomes an instrument, which is what it always was, and an instrument doesn’t need to be saying anything in particular to make you want to move across a room.