Do you have a bassface?

I don’t know how many of you are into Dubstep, Drum & Bass, House or any other genre with a bassline. But let me ask the people who are: what happens to you when you hear a fat tune?

I know that, whatever the genre, a good song always elicits some kind of emotional response. For some reason a huge bassline just does something different, something more physical.

I think it’s most obvious in Fabric or Cable at around 4am on a Friday night. Legions of club-goers all have that classic I’ve-just-heard-about-my-mum-having-sex-with-my-brother look scrawled across their face.

The last time I went there, I noticed a man whose jaw was actually on the wrong side of his face. I wasn’t really sure what to do, or what to say. Was it a medical emergency? Was he even aware of it? God only knows.

I noticed a man whose jaw was actually on the wrong side of his face.

I always thought it was one of those things, a weird kind of mass response. But then, while trying to waste some time during revision period (you’re gonna love it freshers!) I stumbled across the Fred the Raver videos on YouTube. The kid in the videos is about 3 years old: his parents play him Drum & Bass tracks and, strangely, he does exactly the same thing i.e. he pulls a bassface (it’s hilarious, give them a watch).

The child certainly hasn’t been to Fabric (unless he’s got a great fake ID) and he probably has never seen anyone pull a bassface before. So why did he do it? He clearly loves it, why not just smile?

Thinking about it, it didn’t really make any sense, so the Imperial reflex kicked in and I started researching. The number of papers on Science Direct under “bassface” being zero, I ventured into the slightly less reputable corners of the Internet.

There I found a “scientist” who wrote about how, in nature, the only sounds with a major bass component are things like the roar of a lion, a volcano erupting or a tree falling i.e. scary shit.

His hypothesis was, therefore, that basslines “remind” humans of things our caveman friends got scared by. It is genuinely ridiculous (and is probably a crock of shit) but it just might be crazy enough to be true. Just think about that next time you’re out...