Tempo is a decision that’s uniquely important in electronic music.
In rock and other band-oriented genres, musicians can try out riffs and other musical ideas at almost any speed, without thinking too much about the exact tempo they’re working at. But in dance music, most songs are produced with the aim of being mixed into DJ sets, where they must be similar in tempo to fit together. As a producer, what genre you’re slotted into has traditionally been determined by what you type in the little box when you open your music production software, the box marked “beats per minute,” or bpm.
While a certain bandmate of mine rolls her eyes when the subject of beats per minute comes up — “Oh, it’s you producers talking in numbers again” — it’s not just a topic for DJs. Everybody can feel the difference, because a song’s tempo dictates how your body moves. The pace of a deephouse track, at 120 beats per minute, inspires dancing at a comfortable, shuffling cadence. That’s something much different from the way a drum-packed 170 bpm jungle/drum’n’basstrack pushes you to step frenetically back and forth in double time.
For most of its existence, dance music has hewn closely to these two tempos, in particular the slower of the two, because it’s the most comfortable for the human body to dance at. That’s the speed of disco, house and techno — around 120 to 130 bpm.
A new tempo emerges
In recent years, a fresh tempo has come to the fore. While dubstep attracts a lot of attention for its signature wobble bass and melodramatic drops, its greatest innovation has been the widespread popularization of music at 140 beats per minute. It’s a pace the dance floor had occasionally visited before, but never embraced as a full-fledged scene — until now.
Listen for the way Skream's dubstep classic moves you in a unique way. Your head nods to the skittering hi-hats at a pace that feels faster than house, but the bass pulses in a way that sways the rest of your body very slowly.
The dubstep explosion has been paralleled by a rise in the popularity of rap music at half the speed — 70 bpm. Urban and pop radio first seriously embraced such low-riding speeds in the mid-2000s with songs like RickRoss’s “Hustlin’” and Chamillionaire’s“Ridin’” and today rap is replete with slow burners. Since dubstep’s tempo divides perfectly into half-time rap — and many tunes play both sides of the fence — we’ve arrived at a moment that’s unique in the modern history of pop: both underground dance and urban music have navigated to an undiscovered tempo at the same time.
Producers weigh in
I spoke to some of Canada’s most inventive producers to get their perspective on 140 bpm. Marcus Visionary, from Toronto, came to prominence for his work in drum ‘n’ bass before releasing the 140 bpm Carib EP in 2009. Toronto-to-Berlin transplant XI was one of dubstep’s earliest supporters on this side of the Atlantic, and some of his greatest moments as a producer have come at 140. Victoria producer Monolithium runs Sub|division, one of the most active chroniclers of bass-heavy dance music in Canada and around the world.
Visionary says he felt the excitement around dubstep when it first crossed the shores from the U.K. to North America several years ago. “I remember a change starting to happen in 2005, when the darker dubstep started to bubble to the surface — I think drum ‘n’ bass was a little too fast for people and they’d been listening to it for almost 15 years. U.K. garage was a little too R&B/house-y, and grime was a little too street. Dubstep was instrumental, so I think people were ready to embrace the change. It was mysterious and exciting and new.”
On the rap side, Monolithium links 70 bpm directly to the rise of southern rap. “That ‘slow club dance’ vibe is a Southern thing — a ‘dancing while not spilling my drink’ thing”.
While they were born in different places, dubstep and slow rap open up similar rhythmic possibilities for beat producers. XI believes they share a beautiful awkwardness. “The inherently interesting thing about 70/140 is that it’s either too slow, or too fast. But it’s never just right. 70 is so slow that it’s almost impossible not to be able to catch it, and it just kind of rolls you along at that speed.
“140 — it’s awkwardly fast. What’s interesting is you still get the feeling of the awkward fastness of way-too-fast jungle, but because it’s 140, you still have all this room between the beats to generate all these interesting swung rhythms.”
Monolithium appreciates the opportunities created by the unique push-and-pull dynamic of 140/70, which makes it unclear which tempo you’re supposed to move at. “It allows this overall half-time pace that is packed with pockets of double time energy. And there are rhythmic dynamics between the percussions and the hats that really just don't work as well in other tempo ranges.”
What goes up must come down
But the explosion of dubstep productions at 140/70 also appears to have sown the seeds of the tempo’s demise. All three of the producers I spoke with are creating their new work across a broad range of tempos, instead of focusing on 140.
Monolithium points out that in the current climate, “underground dance DJs are almost expected to move through various tempo shifts and hit different vibes and styles. It's a smorgasbord —which of course parallels the current information overload that the internet is providing.”
XI argues that the origins of this new freedom lie in dubstep itself. “The point now is to write at all bpms. And I’m not just talking for myself, this is actually becoming a very popular thing — everybody’s just kind of genre-bending and not really setting the tempo thing too stringently, “ he says. “Having something new all of a sudden was exciting, but it kind of didn’t really stop there. It was like ‘alright, we’ve got 140’ and it very quickly was 130, 125, people doing 150/75. It’s swerving all around the road basically. And it’s so much better and more exciting I think.”
Perhaps it comes back to the role of the mix in dance music. Producers used to feel hemmed in by the necessity that tracks cling to a similar tempo to keep the dance moving. But 140/70 opened their minds to the new possibilities that lay outside the confines of traditional bpms, and to new ways of incorporating ideas from trunk-rattling rap music. Worrying about whether your tunes are mix-friendly ceases to be a problem if producers are making songs at every tempo. And if history teaches us anything about electronic music, it’s that just when a rhythmic idea seems to be in danger of over-saturation, a new movement of producers innovates past it and blows up the status quo. That’s what keeps us listening, right?
Related links:
MUTEK 2011 Preview Mixed by Monolithium on the CBC Electronic Podcast