The video has more than 2 million views on YouTube: a girl frantically speedstacks plastic orange cups, then exclaims, “Oh my God!” as she sets a personal record. Her outburst is hardly musical, yet it’s this short sound byte that is sampled in Skrillex’s hit song “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”—a four-minute aural onslaught of heavy bass, distorted synths, and beats so convulsive they could cause an earthquake. A first-time listener might call it an attack on the eardrums. We call it dubstep.
