Tricky Pre-Millennium Tension (Island)
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That time was the first half of the 90s; that place, the western port city of Bristol. Then and there acts like Massive Attack–of which Tricky was a junior member–and Portishead gained recognition for blending soul, reggae, and cabaret rock, hip-hop style, into the sad, ethereal concoction dubbed trip-hop. By and large, it was recognized as the most imaginative and commercially friendly sound yet to arise from the slippery genre that Robert Christgau has labeled “post-dance” (a genre that includes ambient, cut-and-mix dub, and other hard-to-classify strains of quirky groove music). But Tricky hated the trip-hop label with a passion. He said so constantly, claiming in one interview that the term was invented by “a bunch of trendy wankers” who couldn’t differentiate his unique abilities from the rest of the Bristol scene. “What I’m doing, no one comes before me,” he said, and his solo debut, Maxinquaye (Island), was intended as proof.
Released in early 1995, Maxinquaye transformed trip-hop’s soulful, melancholy dreamscape into a claustrophobic labyrinth of alienation. It was a post-dance album for postapocalyptic England. Tricky’s sabotage of trip-hop came from all directions: he inserted discordant sound effects beneath the style’s smooth synth washes, and in his delirious, half-mumbled raps he captured the aggression of American hip-hop without imitating its bluster. Most important, he introduced his great vocal foil (and lover), Martina, a 20-year-old whose thin, almost passive singing gave Tricky’s cruel lyrics a chilling bite (the most quoted couplet must be “I fuck you in the ass / Just for a laugh”). Together these elements made a lush, ferocious music, so compelling it needed no getting used to yet so fresh it made post-dance albums by acts from the Chemical Brothers to Goldie sound innocent and obvious, like quaint oldies.
In reality the greatest achievements of both men were the ones in which they mustered the talent God gave them to address the hand dealt them by history. Lydon’s Johnny Rotten persona sprang from his resentment as an Irish kid growing up in a very hostile part of London at the height of the Troubles. Tricky’s story substitutes race for ethnicity, but otherwise it’s surprisingly similar. After the suicide of his mother and flight of his father, the undersized, asthmatic Adrian Thaws was raised by various relations in a neighborhood full of “Irish youth carrying knives and shotguns,” as he put it in Detour. Though he was constantly threatened by racist thugs, he insists that this “white ghetto” became as much a part of him as his black skin. When he joined up with the DJs and MCs who would become Massive Attack, he brought to the interracial crew his love of both hip-hop and the Specials, Bob Marley and David Bowie. Though Tricky initially tried to be a straight rapper, his background came through strongly as he and his friends went about inventing trip-hop, and the contradictions within that background–call it the tension between love and hate–reached their apex on Maxinquaye.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Lawrence Passera/ album cover.
