On the ground, the sound did resonate in a genuine way among a new generation of musicians seeking freedom to experiment. In 1998, The New York Times retconned Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines as the so-called genre’s inception point. Most notably, it became a byword for the Bristol sound epitomised by bands like Massive Attack and Portishead. Just as techno had become a synonym for dance music, trip-hop soon became a crutch for journalists and marketers wanting to signify hip-hop without rappers. Trip-hop was a logical evolution in a decade during which everyone came down from a partying high to face the reality that hip-hop and dance music were being co-opted by the mainstream dreams of a new sonic utopia crushed by the relentless onslaught of capitalism. Sound systems, digging, dub, chill-out rooms, early globalisation and technology also acted like so many molecules attaching themselves to a new idea of what hip-hop could be. One strand came from hip-hop, which had fed the musical imagination of a new generation for over a decade, while another strand came from rave, which had provided further stylistic possibilities with its fusion of drum machines, breaks, samples and synthesisers.
The DNA of trip-hop was more complex than its reduction to bite-sized adjectives. Pemberton heralded trip-hop as a psychedelic take on hip-hop and the first valid alternative to America’s dominance of the music. I say this as someone who, for the past 18 odd years, has loved the music just as much as I’ve hated the term.Ĭoined in June 1994 by Andy Pemberton in a feature for Mixmag, trip-hop was used to describe the recent stylistic shift of the Mo’ Wax label and that music’s popularity in dance circles, particularly in after hours sessions.
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