karenita js regular
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4 May 2009 22:05 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
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Is Caspa the Guy Ritchie of dubstep?
Discuss.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/may/01/caspa-dubstep-wobble-yob
Is Caspa the Guy Ritchie of dubstep?
Loved by punters, Caspa is the big man of dubstep. Yet others dismiss him as a 'wobble yob'. So will anyone give his debut album a fair listen?
Wobble yob?
A couple of weeks ago Fabriclive hosted the launch party for Everybody's Talking, Nobody's Listening, the debut album by Caspa, one of dubstep's top DJ-producers. Caspa, aka 26-year-old Gary McCann from west London, plays big rooms for reputedly big money (by dubstep standards, anyway), dropping big bassline tunes that bludgeon crowds into rowdy rapture. A measure of Caspa's bigness is that he and partner-in-crime Rusko were the first (and so far only) dubsteppers to do a Fabriclive CD mix.
You'd expect the debut album by such a prominent, if polarising, figure in the scene to get loads of attention. Yet strangely the impression I get is of blanket non-coverage. All the obvious places, from FACT to The Wire (dubstep-besotted to the point of having Kode 9 on its cover this month) appear to be giving it the cold shoulder. Online discussion is equally muted. In these circumstances the title Everybody's Talking, Nobody's Listening looks like a chronic case of delusions of grandeur, with a tinge of paranoia. But it isn't. Over the last nine months, people have been talking a lot about Caspa and the style of oscillator-bass tunes he's associated with, what people in the scene refer to as wobble.
And few have anything nice to say. Here's a medley of typical abuse: "Dumb macho wobblers with no sense of soul or subtlety", "numbskull bass drops", "mid-range chainsaw bass bollocks", "aggressive soulless white-boy s**t … that has NOTHING TO DO WITH DUBSTEP AS IT WAS." There's been handwringing about how "the mainstream of dubstep is becoming such an abortion", complaints about "a whole aesthetic/gross behaviour … tied to that kind of dubstep" with "every pissed middle-class student wanker acting like geezer and geezerette on dancefloors across the country". This is just a fraction of the negative commentary stirred up by Caspa and the nu skool of "copycat cockstep". Most bizarre of all are the descriptions of wobble's hard-riffing blare in terms of "someone jizzing in my face" and "bukkakestep"!
I had to do a double-take when I first encountered all this anti-Caspa/death-to-wobble chat. This is dubstep we're talking about, right? A scene I'd always thought of as a bit blokey but essentially affable, and perhaps restrained by scholarly reverence for its various roots. When exactly did it become a lumpen, lairy racket, a soundtrack for lads and ladettes to have it large? (Two of Caspa's EPs were titled 'Ave It Vol 1 and Vol 2, and the album Marmite features a hoarse, booze-bleary MC yelling "all the people out to have a FUCKIN' good time, say YEAH!").
But how bad can it actually be on the scene's big-room floors to have the original dubstep headz and scene custodians in such a lather? If it's just a certain element getting boisterous, taking a shirt or two off, bumping up against you and leaving some sweat on your nice shirt, well … that's a rave, innit? Something to be taken in stride. Or are we talking guys literally skanking with their cocks out?!
Another thing that initially surprised me was this idea that dubstep now contains a mainstream that is opposed to, and by, its experimental peripheries. Caspa and the wobble yobs are commonly attacked as "commercial crap" (bizarre, given that B-line brutalism of this ilk is unlikely to be troubling the UK top 40 any time soon). Then I remembered I'd noticed this emerging divide myself at New York's Dub War club a good 18 months back. The weirder, more rhythmically complex dubstep was played early in the night, but the peak hours were dominated by formulaic bangers.
Headlining DJs Mala and Loefah dropped tune after tune that hewed to a rigid template: a loping half-step beat, a juddering bass-riff, and running almost at right angles across the riddim a grating synth-riff that quacked like some kind of robo-duck. The effect was samey but vibey, for these dirge-bass anthems drove the crowd apes**t, they were yelling for rewinds and leaping about even though the music's tempo was incredibly sluggish. Blogging about the night I used the old jungle term "jump up" to describe all these crass crowd-pleaser anthems. And apparently that's what people on the scene have been calling the wobble style purveyed by Caspa, Rusko and similar leading DJs like Plastician.
Why does "macho" always come up with Caspa's music? Well, he has talked in interviews about how his ideal night-out is "to get on the lash, get smashed off my tits, and get in a fight with someone". He nominated The Football Factory, a film about soccer hooliganism starring Danny Dyer, as his favourite film. On Everybody's Talking, Riot Powder is named after a nickname used by Feynoord fans for donkey ass , which they take to whip themselves into a berserker frenzy and numb them to the pain of close combat. Watch the Holland episode of the documentary The Real Football Factories (also fronted by Dyer) to hear DJ Paul Elstak describe Rotterdam hooligans going to gabba raves, partying all night and then heading straight to the terraces still buzzing on drugs.
While he's clearly cosmopolitan and internationalist when it comes to soccer violence, Caspa talks about being obsessed with "British culture". "Marmite", on the album, is probably not a paean to the yeast-flavoured ointment we Brits rub on our toast, however, but Cockney rhyming slang for "rubbish" (via "talking s**te"). Rusko and Caspa are well into their London gangster mythology: the former made the big tune Cockney Thug while Caspa's Well 'Ard featured a movie sample that goes "Geezer was so hard even his f**king nightmares were scared of him".
Factor in the source of his alias (homage to Casper, one of the least wholesome characters in Larry Clark's film Kids) and the early track Custard Chucker (suggesting there's a kernel of psychosexual truth to the association of wobble riffage and flying jizz) and you'd have to conclude that McCann does have an unsavory preoccupation with masculinity. His music is so over the top it's almost butch. Still, there's a bit of a double standard here, I think. When grime artists act gangsta (Terror Danjah's Cock Back, D Double E rapping about how bullets will make your face cave in), that's usually justified as reflecting street realities, or made allowances for as teenage boy-man overcompensation. But when Caspa does it, he's the Guy Ritchie of dubstep.
No doubt he could afford to work on his sexual politics. Victoria's Secret, on the album, appears to be a stab at making "something for the ladies", all cheesy sax and a feminine voice cooing a lovey-dovey phone message. Maybe it's just the song title, but it makes me think of a guy whose idea of a birthday present for his girlfriend is sexy lingerie (a present for himself, in other words). Also a bit cringy but sonically far more compelling is the oddly addictive Disco Jaws, which features MC Beezy out-geezering Mike Skinner with a lyric written from Caspa's viewpoint and detailing the tribulations of the dubstep superstar DJ lifestyle, which range from sycophantic nerd-boy fans to groupies who won't take no for an answer.
Overall, Everybody's Talking, Nobody's Listening is a mixed bag. Rather than sticking to wobble, Caspa tries to showcase his range and make it clear he knows his history too. Hence the clumsy opening gambit of an intro voiced by legendary soundsystem selector/radio DJ David Rodigan: "From King Tubby's echo chamber in western Kingston to the dubstep phenomenon out of London ... dark rooms with heavy basslines full of fans who are only there for the music and selectors who not only play it but create it … Are you listening? Because Caspa's playing." This genuflection before roots'n'culcha is blown to the winds immediately by Low Blow, along with Marmite the killer example here of Caspa's bass-blast style. With these tracks it's as though both halves of the word "dubstep" have been crossed out: the rhythm, void of all traces of Jamaica or UK garage, is neither skanking nor skippy but a slow stampede, like gabba on cough syrup.
Caspa's debut is bookended with another gesture to the ancestral, Back to 93, a pleasing jungle roller harking back to the DJ's induction into London's rave continuum at the tender age of 11. Everybody's Talking is traditional in another sense: it belongs to a lineage of single-artist albums made by hardcore/jungle/garage artists that are suffused in the pathos of belatedness. By the time the album comes out the style with which the producer made his name has been left behind. These albums – Altern-8, Eon, Liquid, Alex Reece, too many to list – sometimes have lost gems or stray oddities secreted on them, semi-successful gestures towards diversity and expanded musical horizons. But all in vain; the scene has moved on. Neither pandering fully to the punters nor sufficiently "progressive" to placate the pundits, Caspa's debut may well achieve negative crossover.
Is Everybody's Talking a tombstone for wobble, then? Probably. But not necessarily. See, the curious thing about the anti-wobble backlash is that whatever you might say about the style –crude, concussive, an instant cliché – it's the one time that dubstep has actually sounded like nothing else around. In its early years, the genre seemed to have no centre or edges, to be forever bleeding back into other, earlier styles: digidub, the more minimal strands of UK garage, techstep. Then dubstep definitively arrived at itself with the half-step riddim and the oscillator bass-riff. Only for the cognoscenti to recoil almost immediately. Yet the exits they're currently hurrying towards seem to be less distinctive, whether it's the Dilla'n'bass sound of the Genre Formerly Known as W****y, or assimilating ideas from funky house, or merging with Basic Channel-style dub-techno.
Caspa might not be able to move on even if he wanted to. The massive's demand for wobble is unlikely to fade, coming as it does from dubstep's new contingent (those dreaded students, refugees from drum'n'bass, even free-party ravers). The money might simply be too good to quit. I'd wager that it's the children of Caspa, producers whose world started with tunes like Coki's Spongebob as opposed to obscure Noughties prototypes by El-B and Horsepower, who will decide the genre's future. Meanwhile, if I was Caspa I'd make a Put a Donk On It-style video to go with Disco Jaws and really go for it. |
JMHO
