Dubstep debut

Standing in the freezing cold. A mob of 18-year-olds. Being blinded by ridiculously bright spotlights. It was almost worth it to see Cirque Du Womp’s first-ever show in Lansing.

Saturday night, The Loft was packed with bright colors, things that glowed, and quite a lot of people; the Facebook event had 758 confirmed guests. In fact, it might be one of the first times The Loft has held a sold-out show.

This dubstep show was quite a spectacle. Music was provided by four artists, with live painting and sideshow acts, including glass-eating and Joshua Wilde sawing Olive Oyl in half.

Dubstep is a subgenre of electronic music. With more drums, a lack of vocals, and clipped samples layered over each other, it provides quite a spin on the normal hip hop/electronic sound.

“It’s like the metal music of the electronic genre,” Michigan State University junior Jeremy Skvarce said. “It’s heavy and grimy.”

It’s a more complicated form, with very few lyrics (if any) and more beat-driven, which is why Amir’s performance was surprising.

I started to doubt the people at The Loft knew what dubstep was although, to be fair, my definition was quite rocky for a while, too.

Amir fell into the genre of hip hop. Although the beats were good, he rapped the entire time and it just wasn’t quite what people consider dubstep. But the crowd ate it up.

Amir, a human biology senior at MSU, said that he and his friends started free-styling when they had nothing else to do and he just kept going with it.

“I have a speech problem,” Amir said. “But when I do poetry or sing or rap, it’s gone.”

The crowd enjoyed Amir’s performance so much they wanted to be a part of it, so a few climbed on stage. And — if you couldn’t guess — the sideshow performers and security both told them to get off.

Drchandt was up next, and wasn’t as well received by the crowd as Amir. That’s probably because they played more actual dubstep. There were no lyrics, the beats were intricate, the drums reverberated and Dan Chandonnet used an actual mixing board and keyboard along with his computer.

Further into the set, some of the tracks started having that “club” feel and that’s when Drchandt won the crowd over. From that point on the crowd didn’t really stop, except to watch the Cirque Du Womp crew perform.

Olive Oyl ate glass and hula-hooped like it was the 1940s, when only the cool kids did it. While Joshua Wilde juggled glow-in-the-dork orbs while wearing a “Repo!”-style mask, and later he cut Olive in half. That saw was real — he cut a watermelon to show us — so I don’t know how he did it without killing her.

All in all, The Loft was poppin’ Saturday night, and the crowd was steppin’— dubsteppin’, that is.