We are thrilled to invite you to the next IASPM Benelux Pop Talk with Dr. Ed Katrak Spencer. The Pop Talk is organized in collaboration with Amsterdance. It will take place on 8 October, from 15:30 to 17:00, in room 3.01 of the University Theatre (Amsterdam). Online participation is possible.
To join the online livestream of the Pop Talk please register here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/meeting/register/vhCZ-A-LT0u8_LMxGpXyJA#/registration.
Dubstep and its Demons: Musical Trolling in the Age of Internet Memes
From its origins in South London in the 2000s up to the ‘second coming’ of the US music producer Skrillex in the early 2020s, dubstep has always been thoroughly entangled with online media and discourse. This talk conceptualises dubstep as an internet meme that is involved in various kinds of (anti-)social practices – musical trolling. This central idea of musical trolling concerns the ways in which dubstep has often been involved in the demonization of various Others in order to conjure perverse kinds of laughter. The talk contributes to the study of online music cultres and also intervenes within the study of electronic dance music culture by focussing on controversial phenomena that are rarely addressed in academic work.
After considering the gendered reputation of ‘brostep’ during the early 2010s, the analysis begins with an examination of ‘cuckstep’ music from the mid-2010s, whereby musical enjoyment was directly derived from demonising ‘weak’ masculinity and left-liberal politics. However, the discussion then considers dubstep’s disarmament and re-weaponization by a very different belligerent in today’s so-called ‘culture wars’ by investigating its role in early 2020s hyperpop. In this case, dubstep became remediated as the sonification of queerness and nonbinary gender identity and was used to demonize ‘incel culture’ (male web users who identify with the experience of ‘involuntary celibacy’). Is it possible for musical trolling to escape the heteronormative androcentrism and misogyny that has been attributed to internet trolling? And to what extent has the early ‘brostep’ era now become totally emptied of its gendered reputation via Gen Z artistry, instead becoming the sound of nostalgia and generational experimentation?
In many ways, dubstep can often sound like the sonification of the digital world’s division, but it is also a vital coping mechanism for web users living in an age of permacrisis. By listening to dubstep and the sound of its online mediation, we are able to hear the very mechanisms of our societal operating system and gain a greater knowledge of what it is like to live in a world of trolling, memes, and musical self-medication. The talk ends by considering the guest appearance of Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley at Skrillex’s Ultra Music Miami set in 2025 and the ‘troll-‘n’-bass’ remix of this musical collaboration by the Dutch collective Explorers of the Internet.
About the speaker
Ed Katrak Spencer is Assistant Professor of Screen and Music Cultures at Utrecht University. His work concerns popular music and the moving image; online (sub)cultures and conspiracy theories; and political division in the age of social media. He was recently awarded a van Oostrom grant to foster collaborative research on music and (post-)truth in the age of GenAI ‘slopaganda’ and is hosting a workshop on this topic in Utrecht in mid-January 2027. Together with Joana Freitas, Steven Gamble, Maria Perevedentseva, and Jenessa Williams, he is co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (MOCReN) and co-editor of a special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is co-editing the book Music and the Internet… (Routledge) with Christopher Haworth and Daniele Sofer, as well as The Oxford Handbook of Online Music Cultures (OUP) with Kate Galloway, Paula Harper, and Steven Gamble. Ed’s work on the weaponization of dubstep music during Donald Trump’s first US Presidential campaign appears in Twentieth-Century Music, and he has a chapter on the divisiveness of the bass music drop in the North American festival setting in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music. He is currently working on a monograph titled Dubstep and its Demons: Musical Trolling in the Age of Internet Memes (Bloomsbury) and is co-editing a special issue of Popular Music on ‘Hyperpop’s Hyperlinks’ with Karina Moritzen Barbosa, Michiel Kamp, and Chananja Clement.