It’s definitely a genre that’s had many detractors both at the time and since. At the time was derided for being a white middle class genre that appropriated hip hop. Lot of bullshit posturing like people were “too scared” to listen to proper hip hop so chose this instead. I don’t have the data but I would be willing to bet a fairly large amount of money that the majority of this criticism was coming from white middle class people.
Bit later on was criticised for being beige dinner party / coffee table music which was a little more reasonable as the sound had been watered down a bit.
Original trip hop was also tied a bit to James Lavelle and Mo’ Wax and his rise and fall, and criticism of him sometimes went hand in hand with criticism of trip hop in general
It is good isn’t it. Of the less obvious ones, DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo’s Ki-Oku is an absolutely outstanding album (an all timer), Prince Blimey by Red Snapper is also great, Cold Krush Cuts has a wonderful transition into Autumn Leaves (worth it just for that). Semtex and Nine Deadly Venoms are questionable on that list (great albums, but very adjacent). Not sure about Laika being that far up either. Not going to argue with the top 10. Waiwan’s Distraction should be on there too.
Yeah I like it - guys doing it obviously knowledgeable and have thought about it a lot.
Absolutely - both great records though as you say and if being on the list makes more people check them out then all good. Can argue with the order (DJ Vadim should be about 39 places higher imo!) but covers pretty much all of the key albums from the 90s and a lot more besides
Some of the best music ever, but quite easy to make bad trip hop. Luckily it has been around for 35 years so there is plenty of the good stuff. Might have to throw myself together a playlist for the afternoon
I went and found this after reading the Dummy 33 1/3 book a couple of years ago. From what the book says, they wanted Portishead involved, who said no, but they did get some of the engineers and other people involved who knew how to make the sound
Bjork’s first couple of albums were highly influenced by the early 90’s Bristol sound. She worked with a fair few of them on those albums too if I remember correctly
Nellee Hooper produced most of debut (from what I understand they fell out because he wanted to put house beats underneath all her music). And she was seeing both Goldie and Tricky at different times which led to beef between the two
She worked with Nellee Hooper from the Wild Bunch (Bristol DJ collective that Massive Attack and DJ Milo also came out of) on Debut, which is why it has quite a heavy Bristol sound
