Ashton isn't the king of American dubstep, though. That title belongs to Skrillex, the stage name of Sonny Moore. Ashton considers Moore a friend, and their music shares a number of similarities: Both came to electronic music from playing in metal bands, and have a fascination with big, rumbling bass drops. Their contrasts are more striking: Where Bassnectar tracks often have a sensual funkiness lurking within the throb, Skrillex is aggressively mechanical. And while Ashton tries to avoid the cool-kid spotlight, Moore revels in it, dating pop stars like Ellie Goulding and hitting the L.A. party circuit.
So when Skrillex won three Grammy awards earlier this year, Ashton felt relieved. "I had been really nervous about being the one on top, and getting too much hate for the popularity I had," he says. It "let me feel more like the Les Claypool or the Frank Zappa of the movement, where I just felt much less restrictions and much less expectations." Ashton's fans, who enjoy a sort of rivalry with Skrillex, were less enthused. But even the fact that one of Bassnectar's peers won three Grammys is an indication of the popularity of dubstep and dance music today.
Christopher Victorio
Christopher Victorio
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Ashton rejects the narrative of electronic dance music's "recent" explosion. For him, it's been a much longer, more gradual process. "By 2004, 2005, I thought it was just unbelievably big," he says. "And every year thereafter, it doubled or tripled. It's extremely old news — even though it's beautiful news." But even Ashton admits that Bassnectar is part of the mainstream music landscape in a way that he never expected.
At times he seems uncomfortable with the breadth of his fan base, and he says he's reached a point where he's no longer interested in expanding it. "Obviously, I'm not underground anymore, but I feel like I am," Ashton says. "My personality is underground, my tastes are underground, and I feel very protective of the underground."
Dubstep, the music Bassnectar helped popularize, is no longer underground either. After arriving on the pop charts, it seeped into advertising, and is now practically inescapable. Kowal has a theory about why this sound found success in the states while higher-tempo electronic styles like house and techno struggled. "Maybe kids didn't want to dance as fast," he says. "Maybe we're all fat and out of shape in this country. Dubstep is a perfect electronic music for Americans because we eat too much."
Or maybe there's another reason. Mainstream rock has declined in popularity in recent years, selling fewer and fewer records. That's meant a lack of the deep, aggressive, intensely physical music that many young males — especially white ones — spend some part of their youth listening to. There's an easy line to be drawn between the gigantic riffs of Metallica and Nirvana and the pounding assault of Bassnectar and Skrillex. If anything, the new electronic artists unleash a rumble from their laptops that even an amplified guitar couldn't match. The origin of this music — European clubs — seems unlikely at first, but less so when seen through the biographies of Ashton and Moore, both of whom came up playing metal. So could America have turned dance music into the new frontier of heaviness?
"The answer is absolutely yes," says Live 105's Axelsen. "To the new generation, this is their rock show. These are their rock stars."
Slideshow: Bassnectar in San Francisco
