1. Re: dubstep - it originally started in London as an outgrowth of UK garage, 2-step and other obscure breakbeat subgenres that never reached America. Through a game of Chinese whispers, Americans now know as "stuff that sounds like Skrillex". Frankly, this is a tragedy, as Skrillex is an utter hack with one particularly obnoxious trick, and this:
You know that people still have to make those songs, right? "Synthesized" doesn't mean that they just push a button and music pops out. The people who compose this stuff are still "artists" in the strict definition of the term.
...is
almost not true in his case. In any event, I invite anyone here to Youtube the following: Skream, Distance, Kode9, Burial, 2562, Scuba. I'm not saying that you have to like the aforementioned, but at least the Skrillex disaster will have been averted.
</rant>
2. I can't help but feel these days that, in any aspect of society that involves wide-scale choice, where it's media, entertainment or (especially) elections, we're starting to get something of a short-circuit society. Because market research has become ever-more sophisticated, it now comes down to the most minute variations in order to grab the last possible vote/viewer from a given demographic, like the Isaac Asimov (?) story about an election where research pulls up one completely average voter and invites him to vote in leiu of everyone else. Politicians used to pitch policies and rely on the strength of argument; musicians would write songs and then hope they sold, but they couldn't have been sure. Now polling has Presidential elections granulated down to county level (in the UK, elections can and do pitch to specific wards if need be), and radios select their playlists on the basis of what a few hundred in a test group thought of 7-second clips of music, and the end result if it persists will potentially be a sort of cultural equivalent of Newspeak, an ever-narrowing mainstream across the board.
</thesis>
