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In any event, little seemed to move the genre forward
in the immediate aftermath of 1994 1995 s key releases.
Even as soon as 1996, critics like Wire s Simon Reynolds
were complaining:
Ideas that last year seemed explosive with potential, appear
to have already played themselves out. TripHop, for
instance, promised the ultimate in fucked up, anything-
goes, neo-B-boy abstraction, yet too often delivered a
half-assed sequencing of borrowed bits and bobs, and
a mood spectrum ranging from cheesy affability to pale
blue.229
Even as trip-hop was burning itself out or, rather,
reclining sedately into a chaise longue big beat, the
genre s burly cousin, was achieving massive commercial
success. A loud, combustible fusion of hip-hop breakbeats
and acid house, exemplified by the Chemical Brothers,
Fatboy Slim, and The Prodigy, big beat s popularity
including in the U.S. consumed much of the oxygen
that might otherwise have led to a more sustained period
of electronic innovation in mainstream popular music.
Massive Attack s Mezzanine, Portishead s eponymous
follow-up, and Tricky s pair of sequels (Pre-Millennium
Tension, and Nearly God) would be released 2 to 3 years
later, but by that time there was simply nowhere to go,
and even if there had been, so many of the core artists
would not have wanted to go there.
229
Reynolds 1996.
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R. J . WHEATON
* * *
None of us ever believed in the thing trip-hop , Geoff
Barrow told the B.B.C. in 2010.230 The label was deeply
unpopular with many of the musicians to whom it was
applied. Adrian Utley remembered it as a journalistic
catchphrase for generic music that came after us and a
plethora of bands that were forced into sounding like us
because we were successful. 231
The label seemed contrived, something imposed upon
artists from wildly disparate musical backgrounds. To
some it was reductive, suggesting a slavish relationship
to hip-hop an imitation, a failure to effect a trans-
formative treatment of influences or a cheapening
of that genre s vibrant dominant influence. For others
there were suspicious racial overtones, perhaps the impli-
cation that a predominantly black art form was in some
ways being made more accessible by white musicians.
Moreover the association with background ambience for
bars, lounges, and dinner parties suggested a particular
class trajectory: hip-hop s rough-edged, often militant
street attitude (and origins) softened and smoothed for a
bourgeois palette.
Barrow had always downplayed attempts to claim a
cultural tradition so associated with African-American
culture. I would never make out like I was a hip-hop
kid, he told Michael Goldberg. Because I m a little
white kid from England. I m not living the lifestyle. It s
disrespectful [to] people who have either chosen to live
230
B.B.C. 2010.
231
Gundersen 2008.
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DUMMY
the hip-hop lifestyle or who have been made to because
of the surroundings they live in. 232
With this in mind it is possible to understand some of
the disquiet at articles suggesting trip-hop was the most
exciting thing to happen to hip hop for years. 233 Or, of
Dummy:
For 45 minutes it seemed conceivable that the world s
most popular music had not been invented at Bronx
block parties at the end of the 70s at all. Instead it
seemed far older, a product of 60s spy themes, 50s
crooners and 40s torch singers.234
In these genre labels, ambitious artists saw their music
categorized with material that was commercially oppor-
tunistic, quickly produced, and destined for transience.
Complex production processes were characterized as
crazy beats and fucked up sounds 235 quirky party
noises, cheap effects, spoken-word samples taken crudely
and obviously from cult films. These were the materials
of novelty ephemera, unserious, unambitious. A world
away from Portishead s belabored and artisanal sound-
craft. Trip-hop came with a built-in incentive for artists
to transcend it, spurn it, leave it behind, in order to prove
their own authenticity. Only the imitators remained.
* * *
232
Goldberg 1997b.
233
Pemberton 1994.
234
Harrison, Review .
235
Pemberton 1994.
" 188 "
R. J . WHEATON
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