Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture.

The acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they've even happened. That's a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.

Most music culture these days runs on systems and networks devised to deal with the aftermath of thermonuclear war. Music culture has a habit of using these moods and machines in creative, unintended ways.

There is an uninformed myth circulating just now that makes dubstep way too important in the musical universe - don't believe the hype.

I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore.

When a country is at war or in economic depression, underdevelopment or tightened security, it sets an affective tone or mood, which seeps through into everyday life via all kinds of channels.

The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple.