trip hop

The tradition & historical record

Trip hop is a music genre defined as a psychedelic fusion of hip-hop and electronica with slow tempos and an atmospheric sound. The style emerged as a more experimental variant of breakbeat from the Bristol sound scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, incorporating influences from jazz, soul, funk, dub, rap, as well as sampling from movie soundtracks and other eclectic sources. Pioneering trip hop acts include Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. The term was coined in a 1994 Mixmag piece about American producer DJ Shadow. Trip hop achieved commercial success in the 1990s, and has been described as "Europe's alternative choice in the second half of the '90s". ¹

Common musical aesthetics include a bass-heavy drumbeat, often providing the slowed down breakbeat samples similar to standard 1990s hip-hop beats, giving the genre a more psychedelic and mainstream feel. Vocals in trip hop are often female and feature characteristics of various singing styles, including R&B, jazz and rock. The female-dominant vocals of trip hop may be partially attributable to the influence of genres such as jazz and early R&B, in which female vocalists were more common. However, there are notable exceptions: Massive Attack and Groove Armada collaborated with male and female vocalists, Tricky often features vocally in his own productions along with Martina Topley-Bird, and Chris Corner provided vocals for later albums with Sneaker Pimps. Trip hop is also known for its melancholic sound, due to the fact that several acts of the Bristol scene were inspired by post-punk. Tricky opened his second album Nearly God (1996) with a cover version of "Tattoo", a 1983's "proto-trip-hop" song by Siouxsie and the Banshees released as a b-side of a single. Tricky then covered a pop single of the Cure. Massive Attack also covered and sampled songs of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure in 1997 and 1998 respectively. Trip hop tracks often incorporate Rhodes pianos, saxophones, trumpets, flutes, and may employ unconventional instruments such as the theremin and Mellotron. Trip hop differs from hip-hop in theme and overall tone. Contrasting with gangsta rap and its hard-hitting lyrics, trip hop offers more aural atmospherics influenced by experimental folk and rock acts of the seventies, such as John Martyn, combined with instrumental hip-hop, turntable scratching, and breakbeat rhythms. ¹

In Bristol, hip-hop began to seep into the consciousness of a subculture already well-schooled in Jamaican forms of music. DJs, MCs, b-boys and graffiti artists grouped together into informal soundsystems. Like the pioneering Bronx crews of DJs Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, the soundsystems provided party music for public spaces, often in the economically deprived council estates from which some of their members originated. Bristol's soundsystem DJs, drawing heavily on Jamaican dub music, typically used a laid-back, slow and heavy drum beat ("down tempo"). Bristol's Wild Bunch crew became one of the soundsystems to put a local spin on the international phenomenon, helping to birth Bristol's signature sound of trip hop, often termed "the Bristol Sound". The Wild Bunch and its associates included at various times in its existence, DJ Milo (Milo Johnson, aka DJ Nature) founding member of the Wild Bunch and the person generally accepted as the creator of the Bristol sound and therefore, trip hop; MC Adrian "Tricky Kid" Thaws, the graffiti artist and lyricist Robert "3D" Del Naja, producer Jonny Dollar and the DJs Nellee Hooper, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall. As the hip-hop scene matured in Bristol and musical trends evolved further toward acid jazz and house in the late 1980s, the golden era of the soundsystem began to end. The Wild Bunch signed a record deal and evolved into Massive Attack, a core collective of 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G, with significant contributions from Tricky Kid (soon shortened to Tricky), Dollar, and Hooper on production duties, along with a rotating cast of other vocalists. Another influence came from Gary Clail's Tackhead soundsystem. Clail often worked with former The Pop Group singer Mark Stewart. ¹

Massive Attack's first album Blue Lines was released in 1991 to huge success in the United Kingdom. Blue Lines was seen widely as the first major manifestation of a uniquely British hip-hop movement, but the album's hit single "Unfinished Sympathy" and other tracks were not seen as hip-hop songs in a conventional sense despite similarities in production methods such as using sample-based rhythms. Co-produced by Jonny Dollar, the orchestral "Unfinished" featured R&B singer Shara Nelson, and Jamaican dance hall star Horace Andy provided vocals on several other tracks, as he would throughout Massive Attack's career. Massive Attack released their second album entitled Protection in 1994. Although Tricky stayed on in a lesser role and Hooper again produced, the fertile dance music scene of the early 1990s had informed the record, and it was seen as an even more significant shift away from the Wild Bunch era. In the June 1994 issue of the UK magazine Mixmag, music journalist Andy Pemberton used the term trip hop to describe the hip-hop instrumental "In/Flux", a 1993 single by San Francisco's DJ Shadow, and other similar tracks released on the Mo' Wax label and being played in London clubs at the time. "In/Flux", with its mixed up beats per minute, spoken word samples, strings, melodies, bizarre noises, prominent bass, and slow beats, gave the listener the impression they were on a musical trip, according to Pemberton. Soon, however, Massive Attack's dubby, jazzy, psychedelic, electronic textures, rooted in hip-hop sampling technique but taking flight into many styles, were described by journalists as the template of the eponymous genre. ¹

In 1993, Icelandic musician Björk released Debut, produced by Wild Bunch member Nellee Hooper. ¹

After the initial success of trip hop in the mid-1990s, the artists who made their own interpretations of the genre include Archive, Baby Fox, Bowery Electric, Esthero, Morcheeba, Everything but the Girl, Sneaker Pimps, Anomie Belle, Alpha, Jaianto, Mudville and Cibo Matto and Lamb. These artists incorporated trip hop into other genres, including ambient, soul, IDM, industrial, dubstep, breakbeat, drum and bass, acid jazz, and new-age. The first printed use of the term "post-trip hop" was in an October 2002 article of The Independent, and was used to describe the band Second Person. Trip hop has also influenced artists in other genres, including Gorillaz, Emancipator, Nine Inch Nails, Travis, PJ Harvey, How to Destroy Angels, Beth Orton, The Flaming Lips, Bitter:Sweet, Beck, Alanis Morissette, The xx and Deftones. Several tracks on Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue's 1997 album Impossible Princess also displayed a trip hop influence. ¹

Major notable trip hop releases from 2010s include Massive Attack's Heligoland, their first studio album in seven… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Trip hop”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

trip hop is genre of electronic music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 25 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²