London Dubstep Culture in an Online Discord Community

The Mediation of Bass, Space and Place

Abstract

What happens when a music scene’s spaces of performing, socialising and dancing—including venues, radio stations, record stores and internet forums—are reconfigured online? When the scene in question gravitates around extreme sub-bass and the sound systems that reproduce it, how exactly does that scene take shape on the internet? This article addresses these questions by presenting a digital ethnography conducted with Real Heads, a dubstep-centric music community on the social media platform Discord established in 2019. The analysis focuses on a weekly broadcast of DJ sets by Real Heads hosted on the livestreaming site Twitch. I explore how this communal project, born out of COVID-19, reworks the space and sociality of early or so-called “real” dubstep (when the genre first emerged in London in 2001–6) through inherited musical practices and regimes of subcultural capital, particularly from pirate and internet radio. In doing so, the article wrestles with the tensions between the (im)material space of the internet and the community’s investment in dubstep’s sonics, heritage and performance practices. I argue that Real Heads represents a novel form of DJ culture that warrants critical attention, and ultimately show how the group’s online performances afford potent affective experience outside the physical space and visceral materiality of traditional sound system events: materiality that, at first glance, should be non-negotiable for “real” dubstep heads.