Trip-hop

This month we take a look at trip-hop, the distinctly British melting pot of stoned hip-hop, dub, and punk

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There’s a common theme that runs through our genre retrospective features. Regular readers will know that around half of the genres we cover are known by names which the key artists dispute. From IDM to hair metal, name a genre and there’s a pretty good chance plenty of the artists involved won’t like it. This month we turn our attention to yet another hotly disputed and generally unloved term, trip-hop.

Emerging in the early ’90s, the trip-hop sound was a distinctly British collision of influences including hip-hop, dub, soul and a little hint of DIY punk attitude. Largely downtempo, something like the stoned UK take on hip-hop in its initial roots, we can trace the sound back to the late ’80s, particularly with the 1988 releases of Bristol duo Smith & Mighty’s Walk On… and Anyone…, breakbeat-infused takes on Burt Bacharach’s Walk On By and Anyone Who Had a Heart respectively. The blueprint was set for a laidback and uniquely charismatic sound.

Although it quickly spread further afield, trip-hop is eternally linked with Bristol, a cultural melting pot of a city whose large Jamaican immigrant population has always helped to define the music of the region, from reggae through to drum & bass. The Bristol Sound was a term used to describe the proto-trip-hop music of acts like The Wild Bunch, a loose collective and sound system whose members included Tricky and Massive Attack.

The term ‘trip-hop’ didn’t arrive until around 1994, but the sound was already well defined by that point. The name itself was coined by Mixmag journalist Andy Pemberton, who first used it to describe DJ Shadow’s