In the early 2000s, British producers and DJs grew tired of what they perceived to be an overproduced, ultra-commercialized sound in Grime music-a hybrid of two-step British Garage and hip-hop. Transnational Flow in the Age of the Cloud In the dubstep era, the underground is no longer a refuge to which producers and audiences escape, but rather a local base of operations from which dynamic global networks emerge. While it is often argued that the rise of digital music has eschewed “local” communities in favor of “global” styles, I combine ideas of transnationalism with new media theory to demonstrate the ways in which the rise of social media networks as well as the convergence of EDM across multiple media platforms has actually served to intensify local values within an increasingly global network. In this article, I highlight the complex web of relationships that emerge as a result of the underground/mainstream dialectic by way of a case study, as I contextualize the emergence, proliferation, and evolution of dubstep. While much of the cultural history of the music has developed as a result of a productive push and pull along this continuum, scholarship has yet to tackle the social, political, and musical stakes at play as a result of these tensions. In this way, we may view the perceived underground/mainstream dichotomy not as a polarization but rather as a dialectical continuum among which producers and audiences move, driving the rapid pace of stylistic and demographic change that continues to define EDM in its broadest sense. Yet, just as the social organization of various EDM cultures remains contingent on notions of isolation and independence from “commercial” structures, subgenre forms such as disco, trance, house, and hip-hop have-throughout the past forty years-managed to top the popular music charts and shape the aesthetic values and direction of “mainstream” music more broadly.

Mixing hallucinogens and amphetamines with frenetic dancing and obsession over the latest technologies, the various incarnations of disco, house, and rave music ushered in a youth culture that values fantasy as the new reality-simultaneously moving in and out of step with a socioeconomic and technopolitical milieu always on the verge of collapse. From the warehouses and clubs at the outskirts of the city to the futurist penchant for UFOs, robots, and cosmic cars, the sounds and spaces of EDM have always been guided by signifiers of alterity and abstraction.

Throughout the history of electronic dance music culture (EDM), the “underground” has served as a dominant sonic and social force in the establishment of a subcultural identity.

Dubstep