Trip-Hop: A Look Back

The whole bad apings of Portishead/Brand New Heavies style is a bit "over" for me personally, as a mass dance trend (never could stand it anyway), but the folks who took the rhythmic aesthetic and concentrated on that solely have gone on to produce a lot of amazing stuff. Some great recent downbeat/trippy-hop recently includes Goo, Panoptica, Req, Riow Arai, Dub Diablo, Osymyso, Dj Asmar, the Slabco records crue, etc.

Although the new Mr. Dan EP is really nice... which sounds like a slower take on Ladytron meets recent High Llamas or what have you..

I do wonder what the new record by Massive Attack will sound like (if it ever sees the light of day) and if Portishead are to record again. Would it still matter?!

How many people even embrace the terminology... like "I'm a trip hop head. This is the real trip hop". I always wondered to what extent trip hop ever definitively existed. It's Massive Attack and Tricky. It's DJ Shadow and DJ Cam. It's Mo' Wax. It's Ninja Tune. It's pseudo-jazz muzak for boring idiots. It's hip hop sanitized and altered for white people who smoke weed. Because trip hop has been so vaguely defined, i believe it'll just dissolve as its representative artists evolve. Perhaps this will mean "no relevance" unless they get RHCP, Cyndi Lauper, and Live on their record.

That Cyndi Lauper track is actually the best one on the album, his best song in 3 years. Forget the rest of it, but cool song.

"Trip-hop" was a really lame way to define it anyway. The people who made mellow, atmospheric electro music with hip-hop/dub beats - that really came out a decade ago following Blue Lines, but which has its roots in 80s collectives like Soul II Soul and the Wild Bunch - these people never referred to their music as "trip-hop in the first place. It became a catch-all label in order to differentiate it from other types of electronic music: wow, this is like hip-hop, with these hip- hop beats (and, on Blue Lines which practically did invent the genre overnight, hip-hop *rhymes*), but pretty psychedelic ..trippy.

So far, I think there have been at least three flat-out, indisputed masterpieces of the genre that really influenced all types of music in general, throughout the decade, even music outside of electronica: Massive Attack's Blue Lines, Portishead's Dummy, and Tricky's Maxinquaye (perhaps Entroducing too). These are very obvious no- brainers, but I think it's worth noting the impact they've had, since they have influenced everything in the mainstream from backing coffeehouse tracks to Nike ads- pretty much the hip, urban sound of the technological 90s. To criticize "trip-hop" for being "whitewashed hip-hop" (which it isn't) for an adult, white contemporary public is really beside the point - it was never intended, by its best artists, to be mass-consumed as such, and the ubiquitiousness of thump-thump beats in Microsoft commercials doesn't exactly diminish the potency of their works. We're just so desensitized to that trippy sound now, that we hardly recognize it anymore.

Note that Tricky always hated the label "trip-hop" and always considered his works to be hip-hop proper, just heavy on the psychedelic/dub elements, Public Enemy to the next level.

The above-mentioned artists, I think, went on making albums, some excellent and challenging, (Mezzanine, PMT, etc.) some not (Juxtapose, Postishead's self-titled? I always had problems with it), but their significance in "trip-hop" may well be how they influenced others after they standardized the genre. Dummy set the template - atmospheric, druggy samples, roiling beats, haunted female vocals, that SO many bands were to follow...around 1997, it really started getting out of hand with bands like Mono, Alpha, Lamb, etc. started getting the formula down cold, with the Sneaker Pimps getting major alt-rock airplay on both sides of the Atlantic, and with the British weekly rock press hyping a Brtish-electronica-revolution/invasion of mainstream America that was spearheaded by Prodigy/Chemical Brothers and that trip-hop was to be a component of - something that never materialized, of course, as teen-pop and rap-metal stole the show.

By 1998, the "trip-hop" sound that was still found on, say, Morcheeba's album, was thought to be passe and over, out of style. Yet it never really "died" as countless 3rd and 4th generation bands continued to be influenced by the formulas, like Baxter, and the particular aesthetic style has influenced so many in the mainstream in the following years ("trip-pop"?), such as Garbage, Madonna, Poe, Tori Amos, etc,. etc. - I think it's still very much a creative genre. like Mezzanine and Angels with Dirty Faces have expanded the genre into other fuzzy musical areas such as metal and jazz, respectively...

In 2001, then, maybe we're seeing a slight resurgence of the trip-hop sound with its slight influence all over the Neptunes/Timbaland production works, and with, well...say, GOLDFRAPP'S nomination for the Mercury Music Prize (too bad she lost out to PJ Harvey's WORST album, a despicable piece of trash that shouldn't have won). Alison Goldfrapp's (who sung on Maxinquaye's "Pumpkin") "Felt Mountain" has been getting a lot of press attention and rave reviews, and seeing that it's nothing particularly *new,* that it sounds like Shirley Bassey doing Portishead - even though it's excellent, and that it could have very well come out in 1996, well, considering all this I'd say "trip-hop" is far from dead or "over." It's just waiting to go into an even newer phase...to pardon-my-cliche, "evolve"..

It really is time to kill off the stupid name though "trip- hop",...call it anything else, please!! and yes, the NEW Portishead and Massive Attack albums are expected in early 2002, and they should say a lot in terms of where the genre is going, if anywhere..

pleeease come on someone else TALK say something i HATE when people stop talking after my fucking winded posts

If trip hop is dead and gone, it at least left a mark on today's hip hop production.

Love that Goldfrapp! And yeah, PJ's latest is ok, but far from her best.

You can see how drum-n-bass left a mark on modern R&B, too ... when you listen to the sped-up, erratically-syncopated snare & hi-hat ..

I'll confess; I Was A Early Twenty-Something Trip-Hop Enthusiast. I still am, though in a much more muted form; it's just one of those sounds that gets to me, like early 90's ambient house, or sad, mopey rock .. I think, for our musical favorites, we let our standards down a little, because the sound is so important that any reasonable reiteration of it satisfies the part of you that craves similarity while making for a slightly new experience ..

so I amassed a good amount of trip-hop albums. and now, as a service, I'll make up a 4-tiered ranking of the best and worst:

1. [the most worthwhile] Massive Attack - Protection & Mezzanine, Tricky - Maxinequaye, Portishead - Dummy. These three (four) are definitely the triumvirate. But also, if you consider Björk's "Post," that would definitely be a peripheral candidate .. and some more modern candidates include both Bows albums (Blush & Cassidy), as well as Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain ..

2. [worthwhile albums if you like the genre, or want luvv-making mood- music] Massive Attack - Blue Lines (I know that most people list this as their best, but I honestly don't think it ages as well as a whole -- fun, but sounds too dated), Nearlygod - self-titled, Lamb - self-titled (someone listed this as a second-rate clone, but they made excellent dance music -- her voice is quirky and incredibly cute, and Andy produced some rich, excellent bass tones), Hooverphonic - A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular (a nice by-the- numbers job, with a bit of a rock/Cocteau Twins angle thrown in .. their first album, the other two quickly went downhill), Morcheeba - Who Can You Trust? (very similar to Hooverphonic, in that they made an excellent first album followed by two increasingly awful ones -- more of a slow, soulful take on the sound here), Collide - Chasing the Ghost (closer to gothic/ethereal/synthpop, very sensual, good album though a bit pretentious), Esthero - Breath From Another (good pop songs, reminiscent of Saint Etienne's later albums with some hip- hop influence thrown in) .. oh, and don't let me forget Kruder & Dorfmeister's K&D Sessions. I don't consider DJ Shadow to be trip- hop, nor cLOUDDEAD or any of the Anticon tribe I've heard ..

3. [honourable mentions] Andrea Parker's work, like on "Kiss My Arp," Soma Sonic - Future (by-the-numbers trip-hop, with a bit of drum-n-bass mixed in), Sunday Munich.

4. [the untouchables] Olive, Poe, Moloko, Puracane, Dubstar, Groove Armada, the Supreme Beings of Leisure, the Egg, the Cardigans' 2nd album, Switchblade Symphony's 'The Three Calamities,' just about any compilation that claims to be trip-hop ..

I agree with what's been said ... there aren't many trip-hop heads as an identifiable community, especially in visual terms. alot of people latched on and then left when it became unfashionable ... kind of a shame, because now it's kind of stigmatized as runway chic ..

whatever happened to Martina Topley-Bird's solo album? and what would have become of the famed post-OK Computer/Mezzanine Radiohead/Massive Attack collaboration that never happened?

chris.

oh yeah, two more worthless hucksters: Sneaker Pimps and Alpha.

and two more worth-checking-out-in-a-historical-sense: Smith & Mighty and Pressure Drop, both pre-trip-hop r&b-type groovers that influenced the Bristol crew..

I didn't mean to mention Lamb as a "clone," not at all, I was just listing them as part of a group coming out in a year (97) that sort of overwhelmed the Brit press for a moment, so that by the next year they had to announce the sound as "out of style." I too admit, I'm a sucker for this moody style..

That Martina album had no set release date, I think, but my greatest hope would be for her to team up again with Tricky on *his* albums, since I sometimes wonder whether he can get by without her if he keeps using these ill-choiced vocal reggae guests. Her voice was so powerful combined with his music...definitely, with a few exceptions, her songs were the highlights of PMT and Angels. Since they do share a lovechild, I'm sure that a chance of a reconciliation is very high, since he said in that Mixer review that he's determined to be a good father and always a "part of her life." He's also supposed to be either on or simply producing 3 or 4 of the songs on her new album, so that should be something to look forward to, whenever it happens, if it happens...

Sneaker Pimps: yes, their early days they were a very, very derivative, 3rd-tier Portishead, trendy, band-wagon hopping band with a so-hip-I'm-going-to-die female vocalist (Dayton), but that first album remains a pleasure of mine - one I'm not guilty about. Excellent production, nice-effort-lyrics, eurotrash movie samples, the single (Spin Spin Sugar) which remixed by Helden helped usher in UK speed garage - it's all there, and the green cyberish artwork is cool.

BUT since then they kicked Dayton out, and went weird and recorded an album called "Splinter" that features the guy attempting to sing, and wasn't even released in the US. It got good reviews in NME, is really raved about by the never-reliable amazon customers, and even though it got 2 stars at AMG (which is more like a buying guide with the nonsensical rating system anyway) the *reviewer* really loved it and called it a trip-hop masterwork, comparable to Mezzanine. Which really piques my interest...

Soooooooooooo.. if anyone out there has heard "Splinter" please let me know if it really is worth checking out, ie if it is really as good as they say, not whether it's worth the thirty or so import dollars....because we all know nothing is worth thirty dollars and I'll just steal it from an import store

like most everything - tis mostly olde shite & always was. luke vibert still rules (& a friendly chap too - helped me on to the wrong night bus after a rather over ambitious nite out on the tiles). ciccone youth's "white album" is what trip hop might've hoped to have been. if i was going to get stoned (gave that up - i'm stupid enuf as is" why do i wan't to feel paranoid - screw this john barry ipcress files shite. i'd rather play bongos along to hawkwaind's space ritual (in all actuality amon duul's psychedelic underground but i wasn't sure anyone had heard it)