Bass for Freedom

I stumbled upon this video last week and had to post about it. Produced by XLR8R TV (the Youtube brand of XLR8R music magazine), it features the legendary Mary Anne Hobbs talking about Cali Beats, the scene, and the phenomena thereabouts. 

Mary Anne Hobbs is a fundamental figure in the explosion of bass music and widely known as the woman who brought dubstep to the masses. She is most well known as a DJ for the BBC's Radio 1, perhaps the most influential radio station in the world when it comes to electronic music. Hobbs began DJing Radio 1's rock show, but she is famous for hosting their "Experimental" show in which she championed Dubstep and Grime music. One of the esteemed authors of Hobbs's Wikipedia says:

"Her 2 hour special 'Dubstep Warz' on BBC Radio 1 in January 2006 is considered the global tipping point for the dubstep sound."

The masses listened to Radio 1, and she had the balls to play this crazy music on Radio 1. She became not just a figurehead, but an authority on all things bass.

So the fact alone that Mary Anne fucking Hobbs (!!!) flew from London to California to "check out the scene" and make this video gives the LA Beats scene a lot of credibility. But she doesn't just check it out, she raves about it.  At 2:00:

"I got this incredible sense of momentum building out here in Los Angeles and San Francisco, this incredible sense of spirit and energy, and this community of producers coming together...to create a scene and move a scene forward...I feel like there is a flashpoint about to happen on the West Coast, and I wanted to be here."
Oh, also...this video is from March, 2009! That's three and a half years ago! Three and a half years ago, Hobbs said the "momentum was building." I think this point, more than anything else, hits home for me. Living in LA, the Beats scene still feels like a subculture, even a few years after this video was made. My friends who aren't music freaks still haven't heard of Flying Lotus (who Hobbs calls the Godfather of beats, "the type of artist that you only come across once in a generation", and "the Hendrix of his time" - strong words), much less any of the other producers Hobbs mentions. Even I, being the beatnik that I am, haven't heard of some of them. And yet, these producers are having such a global impact, as this video proves. AND this was filmed three years ago.

It says a lot about the state of modern music. It's paradoxically global yet 'inside.' It's global because some dude in a shack in Botswana is listening to Gaslamp Killer beats that I'm hearing live in LA. And yet, the beats scene is such an insulated world, as 99% of people in LA and America and Botswana have no idea it exists. 99% of people have never heard of the Hendrix of our generation. And maybe that's what modern music, modern culture has come to. You're either in the scene or you're not. An internet connection allows anyone to be in the scene from any place in the world. But if you're not in the scene, you don't know about the scene and don't care about the scene. Because the internet allows you to surround yourself only with the scenes you care about, the scenes you have deemed worthy of your time and attention.

But what IS the scene? Does seeing the scene live, in person, in LA make a difference? Can the scene, given this "state of modern culture," be propelled into the mainstream? What is the mainstream? Is the mainstream the only scene that matters? Does the mainstream exist anymore? What are hipsters?

I wrote this post largely as an attempt to get this blog back to its focus: the beats scene. The video gives a great sense of what the beat scene is, and these questions it's raised gives me a lot to think about and write about. So don't worry, fellow Beatniks, this blog isn't straying too far...

Stay tuned this week for A Thanksgiving Special: Beats I'm Thankful For. Until then, I'll leave you with this quote from Hobbs at 6:25, talking about the exchange between British and American producers:

"You feel that exchange. It's bass for freedom for bass for freedom for bass for freedom, I guess..."

Oh, and Bob Marley.

"All I ever had...redemption songs...these songs of freedom...songs of freedom."