Towards a musicology of bass culture: Sonic materialism and DJ performance in the city, festival, and online environment

This thesis is an investigation of bass culture, Black diasporic electronic dance music (EDM) genres derived from reggae that are invested in loud, low bass. I respond to the need for a more robust “musicology of bass culture” (Fink 2018) by combining theory with ethnography to offer analytical insights into DJs’ strategies of performance, and the sociocultural contexts in which these performances are situated. The thesis is structured in two parts. The first establishes how bass music inherits traditions from dub, a subgenre of reggae that remixes existing musical material through a principle of creative fragmentation/rupture (Chapter 1). I also examine the theories about sound’s capacity to affect people that circulate in and around bass culture, which I term sonic materialisms (Chapter 2). The second part applies these ideas in three case studies. Chapter 3 considers the bass culture of Bristol and how it has become associated with a particular “Bristol sound”. I offer a more musically precise understanding of this phenomenon through dub and comparative analysis of performances by DJs in the local scene. Chapter 4 investigates Outlook Festival, an event known for hosting bespoke sound systems that invites critical reflection on how live bass music can be unsettling or banal as well as transformative or pleasurable. Chapter 5 then elucidates how bass culture takes shape in a dubstep-centric online community. I examine a livestreamed performance project that sheds light on the shifting nature of sonic materialism in internet-mediated popular music. The Conclusion connects the thesis’s diverse threads, arguing that this musicology of bass culture: (1) widens how researchers can understand relations between performance, affect, and genre; (2) demonstrates the value of analysing DJ performance in musicology; and (3) destabilises, through fragmentation/rupture, the stereotyped identity of live EDM as a seamless flow of sound that affords exclusively utopian experience.