Disney goes Dubstep and ruins your childhood forever

by Tyler Munro

September 12, 2013

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Three hours of Disney-inspired dubstep. Could it go wrong? In a word: yes.

There’s jumping the shark and then there’s this.

An industry term that came to popularity after Arthur Fonzarelli did just that on an episode of Happy Days, “jumping the shark” is rarely applied to music simply because it’s not clear how to do so. DJ Fletch’s Magic Dubstep Kingdom is a strong candidate, but the term might not be strong enough. Brad Paisley jumped the shark when he recorded “Accidental Racist.” Rock radio jumped the shark when it let Creed happen. This? This is much worse.

This is Free Willy, only Jesse’s been replaced by common sense and Willy with DJ Fletch. Starting Magic Dubstep Kingdom I had hoped for a Simpsons inspired Director’s Cut. No dice. This exists and it is fucking awful. By the end of it, I’d almost hoped to be crushed by a literal Orca whale.

A wholly unnecessary, mostly unlistenable tribute to some of Disney’s most iconic songs (plus “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which topped the charts long before The Lion King), this legacy crushing collection of songs clocks in at an astounding three hours. It has twenty songs doubled, with “Chopped & Screwed” renditions padding the already superfluous runtime to head-scratching lengths, complete with a totally uninvited Skrillex cover that shows up on the album in two equally appalling renditions. If the idea is only as bad as the execution, this one’s like trying to thread a needle with a fire hose.

Forget for a minute that tracks like “Hakuna Matata” and “A Whole New World” have no place for drops, and you’ll still hear a digital-only release that sounds hideously tacked together. Songs like Aladdin‘s “Arabian Nights” are stripped barebones and replaced with the Fruity Loops starter kit. It’s immediately obvious that most of the samples culled for each song’s base aren’t taken from the actual recordings. “Circle of Life” is almost immediately crashed with an abrasive, inorganic drop signalled by a lion’s roar, propelling it into wobbly two-steps and completely superfluous, wavering synths. Brostep has its detractors, but when done well, the drop can be executed with gargantuan power, style and even grace. Here, DJ Fletch has avoided the genre’s natural process in favour of familiarity. These songs retain very little of their original spirit; instead, they flip like a dime between straightforward (and shitty) recreations of iconic hooks and force-fed, glitch ridden drops.

These songs aren’t interpretations of the classics, they’re exploitations of them. This is a showcase for DJ Fletch’s entry level beatmaking abilities.

I’m not sure how he got the rights to the samples, or whether he did at all, but Magic Dubstep Kingdom manages to be insulting on all sides. It’s tasteless and tacky. It’s gimmicky and ironic, but not enjoyably so. “Winnie the Pooh” sounds transposed for a ferris wheel and the “Chopped and Screwed” murdering of “A Spoonful of Sugar” is as epileptic as it is misguided. The vocals sound awful, and there’s a sound throughout the entire track that sounds quite a lot like someone’s cat fell asleep on a synth pad.

Magic Dubstep Kingdom comes with a few inoffensive bouncy bits that grow tired long before the album hits its halfway mark. Fletch insists on layering the same dynamics throughout, which quickly turn even its most passable parts into migraine inducing experiences.

Maybe he’ll make some money off the album. Maybe someone will shove a pen in their ear while listening to it. Is either really worth the effort? When South Park ran its arc on dubstep and joked that it sounded like someone taking a literal shit into the microphone, this has to be what they had in mind. Maybe I don’t get it and that’s fine. If this is it, I’m not sure I want to.

Tags: Music, News, dubstep, The Lion King, the little mermaid

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