![]() The scene was so tightly knit that, yes, Tricky was a founding member of Massive Attack before striking out on his own. As Tricky sings on the title track of Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines: “How we live in this existence, just being / English upbringing, background Caribbean.” The music there was the motley manifestation of a culture where the tides of immigration had left their residue. Now that sampling is ubiquitous and all kinds of music are instantly accessible, it can be easy to forget that the very notion of such cross-pollination came to being in cross-pollinated spaces like Bristol, where the club scene met the public housing block. Trip hop should really be remembered as the Bristol Scene or the Bristol Sound, a product of a pre-internet era in which popular music was more directly tied to a sense of place. But this original universalizing tendency was rooted in a hyper-local environment. In this respect it was similar to American hip hop, an all-devouring musical form that could incorporate almost anything into its elastic frame. The whole point of trip hop, in fact, was its destabilization of category, its mixing of disparate genres: electronica, rap, reggae, soul, dub, post-punk. The name, suggesting a psychedelic sort of hip hop, isn’t very helpful, having attached itself parasitically to a nebulous beast as it made its way mainstream. It is difficult to classify trip hop as a genre. I think it’s because the music still manages to invoke that imaginary city and its culture-the sort of place that has all but vanished from my life as I molder away in my apartment, and that had faded even before the pandemic in other less dramatic ways. I have been indulging in quite a lot of trip hop these days, not only out of nostalgia (though I have a dominant form of that particular gene) and not only because I have run out of nineties artifacts to listen to over the course of this endless pandemic winter (there is only so much Dinosaur Jr an aging hipster can take). Listening to trip hop made you want to live in a very specific sort of city: rainy and cold and slightly miserable, where waifish kids found solace in dark clubs shuddering with deep bass lines. I knew nothing about this city but it was, like grunge-era Seattle and the Edinburgh of Trainspotting, a fixture in my adolescent firmament of places where life seemed impossibly cool. The three great trip hop acts-Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead-all came from Bristol, England. I was too young to have been there at the source-too far away, too. Chris Kraus claims that punk’s “golden age lasted somewhere between four and eighteen months” trip hop had at least a few years in the early nineties, before it was eventually stripped of its druggy, underground associations and became our era’s version of lounge music. Like punk before it, trip hop was appropriated and commercialized nearly at the point of its inception, confounding its legacy. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known as trip hop, a bastard genre of languorous tempos and ponderous atmospherics that was once a staple of coffee shops in Amsterdam before becoming the background music at your local Starbucks. Stream the groundbreaking album in its entirety below.This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. Mezzanine is a special album due to its nuances: with every listen, a new instrumental sample or hypnotic melody lulls you into a new plane of discovery down the wondrous rabbit hole of Massive Attack’s sonic signature. The record is a sultry, cinematic work that feels as intact as ever a rarer quality to find in today’s electronic output. The genre, characterized by soulful vocal samples, sensual melodies, oscillating dub grooves, and a hip-hop rhythm, was firmly established through Massive Attack’s 1994 album Protection and then permanently cemented on the 1998 follow-up. Originally founded by singer-songwriter Robert Del Naja and Bristol-DJ Collective Wild Bunch members Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall-and joined by many others including producer Tricky, on and off throughout the years-the band is most notably recognized for establishing the trip-hop sound. Though the record is considered as timeless of a project as ever, the band itself has evolved and transformed since its early heyday of the late 90s. Since it’s original unveiling more than two decades ago during an era of incredibly experimental and dynamic electronic dance music, the internationally revered album still remains as monumental of a work today as it was then. The widely recognized black beetle-clad 1998 LP Mezzanine, from English trip-hop luminaries Massive Attack, turned 24 earlier this month. ![]()
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