Thursday, April 9, 2015

Wobble Culture: The Rise and Plausible Takeover of the Bass Heads

The wobble is sweeping the nation. Still. Sure techno and electronica have amassed clusters of rave culture throughout the decades, but much of the dubstep is something totally else, a blurby womp attack on the brain cells. And I hear these computer mastication beeps and beats in cafes and gas stations now. They even ripple through the car radio in wah-wah-wobble waves, contorting a rap or pop song with robot genocide glitches and dubby speaker splurbs. Like, is that someone bumping Macbook beats in the car next door at a show? ...Justin Bieber? Dubstep has wobbled its way into the mainstream?


I've been resisting the EOTO and Skrillex rave fests for years now, and cringed with a groan when my little brother asked if I listened to dubstep in 2009. And six years later, people still constantly ask, trying to determine: are you a jam hippie or a wobbly wook? So all right, last week I did it, I went to an art opening in Portland, ME that was heavily dub-rave-centric, featuring local djs and button-pushers with color blaring strobe lights. I'd rather swing sweaty hippies around on a mountain to some bumpin' bluegrass, but I was out for a rare time in busy motherhood and super set on having fun.

I totally found tripped-out solace in the narrow gallery hall with big open, windows and bright starving-eyed geometric art, but, determined not to be a bitch in the mud, I let go of stubborn opinions and into the dance high of the crowd. So I got out there, I danced, I jumped, laughed, skipped, spinned, laughed more, spilled beer, made friends, laughed and laughed and laughed my head off. I admit it—I wobbled, and I had fun.

Still, immersion in that glitchy gravelly womp totally spins my head like a film stuck skipping the same bleep of a scene over and over and over. My chakras fizzle into television vortexes staticky on snow. I calculate that the half drooling, half dancing crowd has got to be smacked on ketamine to have such an entranced at-homeness in their glazey-bright eyes. Music is my home when it lights me up and charms my chi into an ecstatic dance, but dubstep distorts and blitches it, so I tried not to listen too intently at the show.

I suppose in the digi-world where getting off is only a click or sext away, the soundtrack of laptops short-circuiting totally fits the disconnected libido of young adults. Watching everyone grind and gear their bodies into the hyperspeed beeps and blooping bass whirls, I could not avoid the perception that everyone was playing out sexual frustrations to the ritualistic spooking and splitching of the speakers. We aren't tribal anymore. Flashing lights, glazed eyes, bumping bodies mechanical as pistons, we are technologick.

My first Bassnectar show was neon hell. It was All Good 2010 when the festival was still in West Virginia, and Bassnectar was scheduled right after Furthur, on the stages immediately next to each other. Everyone was there that weekend for either Bassnectar or Furthur. The musicians with the biggest followings crowded twenty thousand hippies and wooks on the mountain of an oversold, sold out festival—and the crowds clashed like day and night, like Jerry and Schpongle, whiskey and water, coke and dope. Bassnectar started setting up as Furthur's encoring with “Ripple,” pushing glo-stick fanged rave fairies and freak-shows sweaty and marble-eyed into the softly swaying Dead-heads. Of course, half my friends wanted to stay for the last ten minutes of “Ripple” and the others were ready to weave to the front of the Bassnectar stage. The half-naked bass heads started spattering all over the flowy family Dead-head crowd like glow-sticks on the trampled earth.

Yes I love the Dead and loathe the womp, but I was also 20 with raging hormones and high hopes of finding the Phish-head I was infatuated with in the crowd, so I followed my younger friends up to the very very front. Furthur literally played “Ripple” for what felt like a sweaty, shoulder-to-shoulder, belly-to-butt-to-belly eternity. Someone actually shouted, “SHUT UP OLD HIPPIES” before Bassnectar dropped that glurgy, lasery bass that blew our skin back and made Dave's pupils swallow his entire eyes.


Wedged into the jigsawing-hip proximity of thousands of people, we recycled each other's breath rapidly in a sea of revved-up, tongue-rolling, screaming, yelling, and insatiable LED toy spinning and swirling festykins. As soon as the music began skweeching, the somewhat anime galactic gangster rave-bots collectively hooked onto the same waist-up scissory dance groove that spiked the energy and glow-stick war beyond anything my journey-jam-dancing-on-the-moutain-for-ten-hours self could handle. I didn't see that lusted-after Phish-head before the digital chainsaw strobe show started, and no one was moving anywhere for a while. It was not my flow.

When I asked Dave if he wanted to find the others and he nodded fast and nervous like a deer, I knew he was human too. We wiggled and wove back into the shuffling trickle of bearded men lugging sleeping children in red wagons alongside long-skirted henna goddesses.Coming out of the day-glo painted, half-naked, wompily humping crowd, it was literally like humans and humanoids. I left feeling antennae on the beeboppler heads from their spines transmitting dubstep signals, that the heads of the Furthur crowd were light-bulb brains, though some were brighter than others. I felt like a light-bulb.

Many heads were flickering and sputtering in the wake the wobble fest takeover, but Furthur did play “Estimated Prophet” AND “Roses” AND “Terrapin” into “Scarlet” into “Fire” AND an encore of “Cumberland Blues” AND the never-ending “Ripple.” While the 30 year-olds grumbled and sighed about what the festival scene had become, patchwork pitbull mama Janelle said, “Doesn't matter. They played the hippie anthem.” The never-ending “Ripple.” Everyone rejoiced. Thankfully, no one mentioned the “SHUT UP OLD HIPPIES” interruption. At least in that moment.


Obviously, this is not a black and white divide in people, though the shows are in vibes. Plenty of bass heads play the Dead and go to shows where the performing acts feature instruments, not computers. In 2012, Phish headlined Bonnaroo with Skrillex, though they played completely different time slots and days. But with the last of the Dead members playing their last show this summer, what will become of the festival scene? 

Said wobble-fest takeover at All Good happened five years ago. If Bobby and Phil don't step on a stage together again after this summer, what will a music festival be five years from now? People are already bringing less guitars and drums in favor of music and mixing apps on smartphones and bluetooth speakers. Weeblin' with the wobblers yes can be fun, but how is anyone supposed to flow music without instruments truly? Where is the synergy? The human connection from soul through art, through an instrument, through music? Let's try to preserve the fuck out of that please. I push enough buttons a day to watch someone else on a computer blaring a light show be the outlet for my sacral chakra. Fun is fun. Music is sacred.

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