Mark Fisher has some comments on this in his protest diary, which is well worth reading in full, of course it goes beyond the music:
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011750.html
"Day X3, December 9th. There's long been a discrepancy between culture and the post-crash situation. It's now evident that the New Fifties are over - the scenery still survives, but you can push your fingers through it. Paul Mason talks of a "dubstep rebellion", and, although it would be churlish to complain about Mason's report, given that he was one of the very few mainstream media commentators to properly engage with the movement, Dan Hancox is surely right: it wasn't dubstep that was being played last Thursday but "rnb, bashment, road rap, american hiphop and - albeit only once or twice - grime". What's striking here is the lack of any political content, or even - "Pow" excepted - much anger in the music that was played. What we can hear exemplified, in fact, is the disengagement from politics that Jeremy Gilbert has persuasively argued was typical of the 90s hardcore continuum: "given the social and political radicalism characterising most of their immediate antecedents (acid house, with its origins in the black gay clubs of Chicago; hip-hop, only recently having left its 'golden age' of political consciousness; reggae, with its history of anti-capitalism and anti-racism), as well as the traditional radicalism of their core constituency - the multiracial poor of urban London - the music scenes of the 'nuum' were notable for their detachment from any kind of politics, their embrace of competitive entrepreneurial values, and their defence of masculinist and heterosexist norms which other dance cultures were busily and visibly deconstructing at just that moment." What we've grown accustomed to is a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant, experimental dance musics. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist realism, and it's no accident that I referred to Simon's 1996 piece on hardstep in Capitalist Realism...
"At DayX1 I heard the predictable "Killing In The Name" and the even more predictable "Sound Of The Police", alongside The Beatles, Madness, and - depressingly - The Libertines --- and, most jarringly, "Another Brick In The Wall" (hearing "we don't need no education" as we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous experience).
"But this video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible convergence between post-nuum musics and politics. It is my belief that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from the stew of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by "Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields" - but of course (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the "bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington". In other words, this brought together working class culture and bohemia in something like the same way that art schools - so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the 50s - used to. But - with very good reasons from its own point of view - neoliberal policy has been hostile to this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education and the new universities have precisely tried to make theory such as Lacan available to the working class - while also trying to engage with everything vibrant coming out of working class culture - the policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions: philosophy for the bourgeoisie; "vocational" courses for the masses."