It is able to induce a higher state of consciousness as much as it is to release a kind of primordial energy that many have never fully realized until they are side by side with fellow drum & bass heads, getting pummeled by hyperkinetic breakbeats and chest-rattling basslines. Rivaled perhaps only by techno, drum & bass is in itself a kind of religion, spiritual as much as it is an expression of unbridled aggression and frenzy. Still, it is the dirty little secret of dance music culture, the techno-nerd little brother in the basement, far from the glittering, popular light that seems to shine on the popular cheerleader big sister who steals all the light from the mainstream above.įrom festival to warehouse to art opening to renegade desert party and everything in between, drum & bass is a sound that wants to punish and heal you at the same time. There is something holy in the way that a breakbeat can be chopped and reformed into something new, and drum & bass in particular seems to have created a kind of religious fervor in its listeners and followers that is far beyond what other music genres seem capable of pulling. And yet, while the boundaries of tempo, technology and experimentation have resulted in a language and culture that is all its own, there is something primal about the groove and beat that transcends the intellect and dives straight in for the soul, able to unleash a heaving mass of bodies crashing against each other in a kind of primitive fever just as likely to unlock the keys to the universe to someone strapped in on their headphones, contemplating the stars, existence, life. As a music scholar, I’m fascinated by the way drum & bass reflects just how far sampling and remix culture can go. The beauty of drum & bass is that it is both retro and futuristic, complex merely as the result of its fractured and often multifaceted influences, and yet relatively accessible and pleasing to advanced and neophyte listeners alike. Seemingly drawing not only from all branches of the electronic music tree, drum & bass is like a postmodern carnivore that has consumed and integrated all forms of music output over the course of the past century and spit them back at us in a fractured yet completely unique way. Nowhere does the complex nature of electronic music make itself more known than in the overwhelming complexity of the genre we have come to know as drum & bass. How to Talk to Your Kids About Drum & BassĮlectronic music as a whole has a wide and seemingly disparate family tree that makes it hard to locate any one specific root or source from which the rest of the ever-evolving genre has evolved.
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