12th Planet

12th Planet is one of the guys who basically built dubstep culture in America, and if you’ve ever been in a pit when a riddim drop hits, you’ve felt his fingerprints on the scene. His real name is John Dadzie, born in 1982 and raised in South LA, and before he was 12th Planet he was cutting his teeth as a drum and bass producer under the name Infiltrata with DJ Lith’s Imperial Recordings crew back in the early 2000s.

The switch to dubstep came around 2006, and that’s when the 12th Planet name showed up too, pulled from Zecharia Sitchin’s book of the same title. Dadzie is widely credited as one of the first artists to bring dubstep culture stateside, and the scene gave him a fitting nickname for it: “General of the Riddim Gang.” By 2009, URB.com had already tapped him for their “Next 100” list, and his 2010 video for “Reasons” premiered on MTV2, a pretty big deal for an underground bass producer at the time.

He’s not just an artist, either. Dadzie relaunched SMOG Records back in 2007 and ran it as a proving ground for West Coast bass music, then joined Disciple Recordings in 2017 to head up their Disciple Round Table sub-label, putting up new talent instead of just chasing his own releases.

His collaboration list reads like a dubstep family tree: Skrillex (who’s actually called 12th Planet a mentor), Datsik, Doctor P, Plastician, Virtual Riot, Skream, and Flux Pavilion. He’s even crossed into rock territory, working with Korn, and picked up remix credits for artists like Diplo and Foreign Beggars along the way.

Dadzie is considered one of the true pioneers of dubstep, and his unique style helped popularize the genre in the United States long before it went mainstream. He’s stayed active through Disciple in the years since, still putting out music and still shaping the next wave of bass producers coming up behind him.