Trip hop

Trip hop
Stylistic origins	Hip hop, British hip hop, downtempo, dub music, experimental rock, acid jazz, psychedelic rock, ambient, post-punk, club music, lounge, rock
Cultural origins	Early 1990s Bristol, United Kingdom
Typical instruments	Keyboards (especially Rhodes), turntables, samplers, brass, strings
Subgenres
Illbient - Post-trip-hop (complete list)
Fusion genres
Trip rock
Regional scenes
Bristol
Other topics
Bristol underground scene - Industrial hip-hop - Breakbeat - Nu jazz

Trip hop is a music genre consisting of downtempo electronic music. It began in the mid-1990s, growing out of England's hip hop and house scenes, including that of the Bristol underground. It has been described as "Europe's alternative choice in the second half of the '90s", and a fusion "of Hip-Hop and Electronica until neither genre is recognizable."

James Lavelle, founding member of UNKLE and owner of the trip hop label Mo'Wax, stated in 1994,

British hip hop lacks the lyrical skills of US counterparts, but British kids have got the musical side and they know about records. That's the step forward. Now they can do their own style, they don't have to copy anything.

An absence of vocals in trip hop (in its earliest days) led it to find its own voice by replacing vocals with more abstract sounds and having less of a focus on imitating American hip hop.

History

1980s: Soundsystem origins

Trip hop originated in the mid-1980s in Bristol, England, during a time when American hip hop started to gain increasing popularity there along with the then exploding popularity of the house music and dance scene. The originators of hip hop music in the 1970s had been Jamaican-born New Yorkers, but new US regional forms of MCing and DJing arose, and the genre's rise to mainstream success quickly severed it from direct Caribbean antecedents. The UK hip hop scene tended to sample more deeply from Jamaican influences, due to the larger Caribbean ancestry of the British black population, and the existing mass British popularity of reggae, dancehall and dub in the 1980s. Under the influence of American hip hop from the 1980s, both black and white British youth became consumers of hip hop. Hip hop in the UK, unlike the US, was immediately fused with black soul (R&B) and elements of dancehall.

In Bristol, once one of the most important ports in the Atlantic slave trade and now among Britain's most racially diverse cities, 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 Bambataa 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 was one of the soundsystems to put a local spin on the international phenomenon, helping to birth Bristol's signature sound of trip hop. The Wild Bunch and its associates included at various times in its existence the MC Adrian "Tricky Kid" Thaws, the graffiti artist and lyricist Robert "3D" Del Naja, 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 '80s, the golden era of the soundsystem was ending. 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) and Hooper on production duties, along with a rotating cast of other vocalists.

Early to mid 1990s: Trip-hop's mainstream breakthrough

Massive Attack's first album Blue Lines was released in 1991 to huge success in the UK. 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 several other tracks, while their rhythms were largely sample-based, were not seen as hip hop songs in any conventional sense. Shara Nelson, an R&B singer, featured on the orchestral "Unfinished," and Jamaican dancehall 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 '90s had informed the record, and it was seen as an even more significant shift away from the Wild Bunch era.

The term trip hop was coined that year, but not in reference to anything on the Massive Attack albums. In the June 1994 issue of UK magazine Mixmag, music journalist Andy Pemberton used it 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 bpms, 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.

1994 and 1995 saw trip hop near the peak of its popularity, with artists such as Howie B and Naked Funk making significant contributions. Those years also marked the rise of London band Red Snapper. More significantly, the period marked the debut of two acts who, along with Massive Attack, would define the Bristol scene for years to come.

In 1994 Portishead released their debut album, Dummy. A trio fronted by singer Beth Gibbons, Portishead also included sonic manipulators Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley. Their background differed from Massive Attack in many ways besides race - all were white - in that one of Portishead's primary influences was 1960s and '70s film soundtrack LPs. Nevertheless, Portishead shared the scratchy, jazz-sample-based aesthetic of early Massive Attack (who Barrow had briefly worked with during the recording of Blue Lines), and the sullen, fragile vocals of Gibbons also brought them wide acclaim. In 1995, Dummy was awarded the Mercury Music Prize as the best British album of the year, giving trip-hop as a genre its greatest exposure yet. Portishead's music, seen as cutting edge in its film noir feel and stylish, yet emotional appropriations of past sounds, was also widely imitated, causing the band to recoil from the trip-hop label they had inadvertently helped popularize.

Tricky also released his debut solo album, Maxinquaye, in 1995, to great critical acclaim. With Massive Attack, Tricky had been known for his unique, whispered, often abstract stream-of-consciousness murmuring, influential on 3D's own rapping attempts, and already seen as remote from the gangsta rap braggadocio of the mid '90s US hip hop scene. Even more unusually, however, many of the solo songs on Maxinquaye did not even feature Tricky's own voice. His then-lover, Martina Topley-Bird, sang them, including her reimagining of Public Enemy's militant 1988 rap "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," while other songs were male-female duets dealing with sex and love in oblique ways, over beds of sometimes dissonant samples. Within a year, Tricky had released two more full length albums which were considered even more challenging, without finding the same popularity as his Bristol contemporaries Massive Attack and Portishead. Through his brief collaborations with Bjork, however, he also exerted influence closer to the pop and alternative rock mainstream, and he developed a large cult fan base.

The London-based band Archive developed trip hop into progressive rock with elements of both hip hop and orchestral music recently with the album Controlling Crowds (Part I-III and Part IV).

Post-trip hop

After the success of Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky albums in 1994 and 1995, a new generation of trip hop artists emerged with a more standardized sound. Notable "post-trip-hop" artists include Morcheeba, Sneaker Pimps, Alpha, Mudville and Cibo Matto. They integrated trip hop with other genres - including ambient, R&B, breakbeat, drum 'n' bass, acid jazz, and new age. The first printed record for the use of the term "post-trip hop" was as late as October 2002 when British newspaper The Independent used it to describe Second Person and their hybrid sound. Trip hop developed into a diversified genre that is no longer limited to the "deep, dark style" of the early years, eliminating the original impression of trip hop as "dark and gloomy".

Trip hop has influenced artists outside the genre, including Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Travis, Beth Orton, Bitter:Sweet, Deftones as well as Icelandic singer Björk, who utilized the genre throughout her 1993 album Debut and her 1995 album Post. Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue's 1997 album Impossible Princess featured strong trip hop styles on several tracks, as well as also mixing in sounds of rock and jazz

Musical aesthetics

Common musical aesthetics include a bass-heavy drumbeat, often emulating the slowed breakbeat samples typical of hip hop in the 1990s. 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 has collaborated with male and female singers. Tricky often features vocally in his own productions and Chris Corner now provides the vocals for Sneaker Pimps.

Trip hop is also known for its melancholy and surreal aesthetics. This is due to the fact that several acts were inspired by post punk bands; in the 1990s, Tricky and Massive Attack both covered and sampled songs of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure.

Trip hop tracks often sample Rhodes pianos, saxophones, trumpets, and flutes. Trip hop differs from hip hop in theme and overall tone. Instead of gangsta rap with its hard-hitting lyrics, trip hop offers a more aural atmospherics with instrumental hip hop, turntable scratching, and breakbeat rhythms. Regarded in some ways as a 90s update of fusion, trip hop may be said to 'transcend' the hardcore rap styles and lyrics with atmospheric overtones to create a more mellow tempo that has less to do with black American urbanite attitude and more to do with a middle-class British impression of hip hop. As Simon Reynolds put it, "trip hop is merely a form of gentrification."

Trip hop production is historically lo-fi, relying on analogue recording equipment and instrumentation, although more traditional instruments such as electric guitars and drum kits are common features. Portishead, for example, record their material to old tape from real instruments, and then sample their recordings, rather than recording their instruments directly to a track. They also tend to put their drums through considerable compression.

List of notable trip-hop artists

• Air 1995–present
• Allflaws 2004–present
• Alpha 1996–present
• Amon Tobin 1995–present
• Archive 1994–present
• Anomie Belle 2007–present
• Bitter:Sweet 2006-present
• Blue Foundation 2000-present
• Bonobo 2000–present
• Cibo Matto 1994–2001
• Crustation 1994-1997?
• Dido 1995–present
• DJ Cam 1993-present
• DJ Food 1992-present
• DJ Krush 1985–present
• DJ Shadow 1989–present
• Emancipator
• Etro Anime 1998-present
• Everything but the Girl 1982-present
• Faithless 1995–present
• Flunk 2000–present
• Frou Frou 2002-2003
• Gorillaz 1998–present
• Halou 1995–2008
• Hooverphonic 1995–present
• Howie B
• Kosheen 1999-present
• Lamb 1996–2004, 2009–2010
• Lovage 2000-present
• Lunascape 1997-2008
• Mandalay 1998-2002
• Martina Topley-Bird
• Massive Attack 1988–present
• Moloko 1995–2006
• Morcheeba 1995–present
• Mr. Scruff 1994–present
• Nightmares on Wax 1988-present
• Olive 1994-present
• Pogo 2007–present
• Portishead 1991–present
• Red Snapper1993-present
• RJD2 1993–present
• Röyksopp 1998-present
• Smith & Mighty 1987–present
• Smoke City 1997-2002
• Sneaker Pimps 1994–2005
• Télépopmusik 1998-present
• Terranova 1996-present
• Thievery Corporation 1995–present
• The Herbaliser 1995–present
• Tricky
• UNKLE 1994–present
• Wax Tailor 2004-present
• Zero 7 1999–present

See also

• Chill-out music
• Industrial hip-hop
• List of electronic music genres

External links

• "Trip-Hop" Allmusic guide essay by Sean Cooper
• "World of Trip Hop" Webpage