Hinton: DJs do justice to Dogg’s dubstep

Snoop Dogg has not forsaken us. Much like a superhero in a sequel or Artie in the ‘Pete ‘amp;… Snoop Dogg has not forsaken us. Much like a superhero in a sequel or Artie in the ‘Pete ‘amp; Pete’ saga ‘Farewell, My Little Viking,’ the Doggfather has come back from his domestic stupor to save us all. Raise your gin and juice, the messiah has landed.

Last week, the Internet began circulating a new Dogg track, ‘Snoop Dogg Millionaire.’ Sounding vaguely Indian and featuring the Bollywood songstress Tanvi Shah, ‘Millionaire’ is Snoop Dogg’s Dickensian story of how Dogg ‘came from nothing, / Turned [his] hustle into millions.’ The song is wonderfully campy and Dogg even pokes fun at his recent cable offering.

Although promising in print, ‘Snoop Dogg Millionaire’ isn’t terribly musical or well done. Most of the track features the hook looping ad nauseum and the sample of Chase and Status’ ‘Eastern Jam’ sounds shoddily mashed up with the rest of the track. The lyrics aren’t too inspiring either.

However, none of the song’s failures matter. The single most important fact about ‘Millionaire’ is that it is unabashedly dubstep. For the uninitiated, dubstep is a genre of dark, club music marked by stuttering bass at extremely low frequencies and half-time beats. I could go on about what dubstep sounds like, but it probably still won’t make any sense if you haven’t heard it. It doesn’t make sense even if you have heard it. You just know you want more of it.’

How does this all relate to the Snoop Dogg as Christ metaphor? Well, Snoop Dogg is very popular, and that means whatever he does will probably catch on. The suburbs love the Dogg for the spectacular irony of it all, and the city loves him for making good music. Either way, Snoop Dogg could record an album of ambient noise and it would go platinum.

So why does the world’s salvation come in the form of Snoop bringing dubstep to the masses? A world in which dubstep is popular is a world in which all the problems involving music piracy disappear and music tech professionals can start making money again.

Dubstep sounds awful at low-quality on poor audio equipment. As the majority of the song rests on the lower end of the audible spectrum, trashy mp3s lose a lot of very important sound information. Imagine ‘Kill Bill’ without any violence, or ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ without any racial tension or Southern gothic milieu. It’s an unsatisfying affair all around. Listening to a small, pirated rip of your favorite dubstep anthem will be thoroughly unfulfilling. Your petite earbuds will groan and rattle trying to eke out bass. In the end you’ll probably just throw in the towel and listen to Britney instead.

The appeal of pirating pop music comes from how reasonable it sounds in awful audio. In the same way that a video of a cat falling asleep is the same on YouTube as it is on Imax, the Jonas Brothers sound as good in low-definition audio as they do live. For milquetoast products, low quality does not diminish to the experience.

However, dubstep demands both high quality audio files and decent equipment on which to listen to them. The problem with downloading music is that it is difficult to consistently find high-quality rips of CDs and, indeed, at a certain point the maximum quality of CDs becomes a bottleneck. Yes, there are audiophile rips of music out there but it costs a ton of bandwidth and space on one’s hard drive to download them. These might accommodate small demands but if a genre, such as Dogg’s dubstep, were to become popular enough to demand these resources wholesale, low-quality systems would not be able to handle it.

The simple alternative: actually buy your music. Sites such as Beatport (the DJ standard for downloading music) charge small fees to download the highest-quality audio computers can handle. Thus, your dub beats will sound just fine. The true enthusiast will, of course, buy vinyl and ridicule everyone else, but a high quality digital file should do just fine for the masses.

Furthermore, music such as dubstep asks consumers to be slightly more demanding in their choice of audio equipment. Simple computer speakers will hardly do the music justice. This encourages listeners to support their local DJs at the nearby clubs and bars.

What Snoop Dogg’s inevitable popularization of the genre should mean is a reinvigorated music world. More demanding music leads to a greater value of those resources that can showcase what defines it. Such should be the model, writ large, for combating the free product crisis whereby the Internet bankrupts our record labels, newspapers, and bookstores. Give the people something that doesn’t work cheaply and that the Internet can’t do for free ‘hellip; yet.

Holla at’ Erik at ech15@pitt.edu.

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