When Is A Trend Dead? When Bieber Does It.

For the true music snob, the one who’s always declaring the latest trend in music “dead” once it becomes popular with more than a few dozen people, dubstep (a subgenre of electronic music which allmusic.com describes as having “tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals”) has been a moribund genre for years already.

Would you trust this man with your underground genre?

But the true death knell for any underground genre is when it pierces the top 10.

"What's big right now are beats that are in the clubs, like dubstep,” announced the almost-adult-age Bieber when talking about his forthcoming album Believe. “So I want to mess with that stuff, but also stay me. “Sure, dubstep has been big in the club scene for a while, and mega DJ Skrillex has spent years repurposing dubstep for his own inexplicably popular “music,”  but when Justin Bieber announced that he will be “experimenting with dubstep” on his new album, whatever hipness remained in that genre escaped like so much air from a burst balloon.

Clearly Beiber is hoping to replicate the “I-can’t-believe-he-made-a-decent-album” success of Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Love Sounds by employing the same formula of mining the clubs for hip sounds to help him escape the Teen Idol image.

Whether that works is anyone’s guess (hint: it won’t), but regardless of what happens to Justin’s image, there’s no saving dubstep. It’s closed for good.