The kid across the hall from me in Heider Hall likes dubstep. He really, really likes dubstep.

He likes to make my walls speak to me on a nightly basis, though it seems all they’re capable of saying is, “WA, WA, WA,” and/or “WUB, WUB, WUB.” This forced exposure to stomach-churning amounts of dubstep has cemented my belief that those sounds are all it’s really capable of saying in general.

I first heard “dubstep,” the increasingly popular music genre that combines electric club music, modified bass lines and song samples, when I was a freshman on the fifth floor of Gallagher last year. Initially, I thought it was pretty awesome.

So I listened to more of it. And the more I listened to it, the more it all sounded the same. Every song is a slight variation of the same thing, to the point that it’s often hard to distinguish one song from the next.

The dubstep “artist” takes a sample from some catchy song, loops it over and over, throws in a computer generated bass beat (the WUB WUBs), and calls it music. There’s very little originality involved. I can accidentally produce the same thing by playing the radio in my car and driving over rumble strips.

Here’s the hard part, though. There is some respectable dubstep. Occasional anomalies, such as Bassnectar’s remix of Ellie Goulding’s “Lights,” keep me from completely writing off the genre as a whole. A huge contradiction, right?

In a lot of ways, dubstep is like that kid you hung out with for entertainment purposes in high school. You occasionally hung out with him because he was fun and he liked to party, but deep down you knew he was kind

of a moron.

In other words, there’s no denying the awesome feeling I get from some dubstep songs, even if it all is a little moronic. Because how much of the song is good because of work done by others, and how much of it is good because of the dubstep artist’s additions? I’d say it’s more the former than the latter.

But again, dubstep is rarely good. Usually it’s hard to even call it “music.” There’s just no meaning to it. Too often it becomes incoherent, computer-generated noise that you almost have to be on some sort of mind-altering drug to enjoy — which I think is the point for a lot of dubstep fans.

I think it’s something we’ll look back on 10 years from now that will remind us of college, much in the same way that terrible 90s music reminds us of our childhood now, but not much more. All things considered, I think it’s fairly obvious that dubstep is a fad. The “newest music genre” is all so similar that it’s already gotten old.

It needs to take its WUB WUBs and WA WAs and fade away into pop culture obscurity. Hopefully sooner than later so my walls will stop trying to talk to me.