FEATURE:
One Love
Massive Attack’s Game-Changing Debut Album, Blue Lines, at Thirty
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I am going to lean heavily…
on other writers and features because, when it comes to an album as important and scene-shifting as Massive Attack’s debut, Blue Lines, I cannot do it full justice! I just want to nod to an album that has made such an impact on so many people’s lives through the years. Whilst we were seeing incredible Hip-Hop and Rap emerge from the U.S. in the late-1980s and early-1990s, there was this movement in the U.K. that was very much our own. Whether you see Massive Attack as pioneers of Trip-Hop or a British form of Hip-Hop, it was an exciting time for music! I associate 1991 with being all about Pop and Hip-Hop, yet there was this movement forming in Bristol that was incredibly inventive and fresh. Massive Attack formed in 1988 in Bristol, by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws, Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles and Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall. Although Blue Lines (released on 8th April, 1991) is a monumental record, the band did put out other genius albums – including 1994’s Protection and 1998’s Mezzanine. I think that Blue Lines is not only one of the biggest Trip-Hop albums of all-time. It is one of the greatest albums full stop. I am bringing in a couple of Blue Line reviews to end this feature. I want to borrow heavily from a feature on the Albuism website from 2016, as they marked twenty-five years of a classic. The story behind Blue Lines is fascinating:
“The trio of Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles is most commonly regarded as one of the driving forces behind the emergence of trip-hop, the musical style that developed in the early-to-mid 1990s, predicated upon the confluence of electronic, hip-hop, reggae, dub, bass, R&B, funk, and jazz music, among other sonic inspirations. However, the media-constructed term itself didn’t formally enter the musical lexicon until June 1994, when Mixmag journalist Andy Pemberton coined it in reference to “In/Flux,” one of DJ Shadow’s earliest singles. By that time, Massive Attack’s career had already been evolving for a handful of years, so the trip-hop label was subsequently bestowed upon them and retroactively applied to their initial recordings.
From their earliest days to their aforementioned recent recordings, Massive Attack have avoided succumbing to narcissism and the celebrity spotlight, as their mugs have never appeared on any of their albums or singles’ front covers. It would seem, then, that the group prefers for their music, and not their faces, to define their artistic identity whilst preserving their professional integrity. Moreover, their reputation as ambassadors of the so-called Bristol Sound has always seemed to make the group a bit uneasy. “There’s this Bristol myth,” a dismissive 3D insisted during an April 1991 NME interview. “Everyone talks about a Bristol sound, but half our album was done in London and the video for ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ was shot in LA.”
Geographical contextualization aside, Blue Lines, their debut long player from which the masterful “Unfinished Sympathy” originates, was a landmark achievement at the time of its release. Together with Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. One (1989), The KLF’s White Room (1991), LFO’s Frequencies (1991), The Orb’s The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991), and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica (1991), Blue Lines proved a vital blueprint for the proliferation of British dance music as the end of the 20th century approached. Its mellifluous mélange of various inspirations characterized by assorted hip-hop breakbeats, expertly selected samples (Billy Cobham, Funkadelic, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, etc.), dense dub rhythms, cerebral rhymes, and soulful guest vocals is unabashedly reverential to the past, but still represents a fresh and novel sound imitated by no one at the time.
Recorded in Bristol and London in 1990 into early 1991 and released on their own Wild Bunch imprint by way of Virgin/Circa, Blue Lines was the outcome not just of Massive Attack’s musical vision, but also a fair amount of coaxing by one of the group’s most devoted champions. “We were lazy Bristol twats,” Daddy G conceded to The Observer in 2004. “It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio. We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room. It stank for months and eventually we found a dirty nappy behind a radiator. I was still DJing, but what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then.” Executive produced by Cherry’s musical collaborator and husband, Cameron “Booga Bear” McVey, the album was co-produced by the group and the late Jonny Dollar. (As a side note, due to assumed sensitivities concerning the Persian Gulf War raging at the time of the album's completion and per McVey's urging, the initial pressings of Blue Lines and the "Unfinished Sympathy" single were adorned with the temporarily abbreviated band moniker "Massive." A ceasefire was declared on February 28, 1991, and "Attack" was then reincorporated for all subsequent LP pressings and singles.)
Album opener and third single “Safe From Harm” offers one of the album’s most dramatic and foreboding arrangements, largely built around the sample of the revered jazz fusion composer Billy Cobham’s “Stratus” (1973). The track’s subdued, swirling sonics provide the perfect backdrop for Nelson’s defiant voice to shine, as she vows to protect her “baby” amidst the inevitable madness of the world and convincingly admonishes “if you hurt what's mine / I'll sure as hell retaliate.”
Though Nelson casts a wide spell across Blue Lines, the same can absolutely be said for the prolific, sweet-voiced reggae crooner Horace Andy, who features on three tracks with the geopolitically charged album closer “Hymn of the Big Wheel” the most memorable of the bunch. Andy assumes a paternal tone throughout the track, as he reflects on life (“the wheel”) and the human struggle to preserve one’s innocence in the midst of the world’s destructive forces. He laments the environmental impact of industrialization across the song’s most poignant verse:
We sang about the sun and danced among the trees / And we listened to the whisper of the city on the breeze / Will you cry in the most in a lead-free zone / Down within the shadows where the factories drone / On the surface of the wheel they build another town / And so the green come tumbling down / Yes close your eyes and hold me tight / And I'll show you sunset sometime again
Despite its plaintive lyrics, “Hymn of the Big Wheel” concludes with a redemptive refrain, as the sanguine Andy surmises “The ghetto sun will nurture life / and mend my soul sometime again.”
In the twenty-five years since Massive Attack dropped Blue Lines, the group has persevered through inter-band turmoil, departures, and reunions to cultivate one of the most indispensable discographies of the past few decades, with Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1998) completing their trio of transcendent album masterpieces. For better or worse, they will likely forever be regarded as the patriarchs of trip-hop, with Blue Lines the natural precursor to other esteemed debut LPs with parallel sonic pedigrees and structures, such as Portishead’s Dummy (1994) and their long-time comrade Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995).
With no pun intended, trip-hop is a tricky term, a la the equally contrived “neo-soul.” Particularly so when artists’ musical identities are more broadly associated with a genre or movement, which unfairly obscures the merits of their specific works. Indeed, such media-driven, cookie-cutter categorization risks diminishing the uniqueness and dynamism of a band like Massive Attack. But those able to cast such superfluous labels aside recognize Massive Attack’s music for what is fundamentally is. Quite simply, great music”.
It is no surprise that such a bold and brilliant album got critics talking in 1991! I want to bring in a couple of retrospective reviews that show, no matter when critics approach Blue Lines, it resonates and leaves a mark. This is what AllMusic said in their review:
“The first masterpiece of what was only termed trip-hop much later, Blue Lines filtered American hip-hop through the lens of British club culture, a stylish, nocturnal sense of scene that encompassed music from rare groove to dub to dance. The album balances dark, diva-led club jams along the lines of Soul II Soul with some of the best British rap (vocals and production) heard up to that point, occasionally on the same track. The opener "Safe from Harm" is the best example, with diva vocalist Shara Nelson trading off lines with the group's own monotone (yet effective) rapping. Even more than hip-hop or dance, however, dub is the big touchstone on Blue Lines. Most of the productions aren't quite as earthy as you'd expect, but the influence is palpable in the atmospherics of the songs, like the faraway electric piano on "One Love" (with beautiful vocals from the near-legendary Horace Andy). One track, "Five Man Army," makes the dub inspiration explicit, with a clattering percussion line, moderate reverb on the guitar and drums, and Andy's exquisite falsetto flitting over the chorus. Blue Lines isn't all darkness, either -- "Be Thankful for What You've Got" is quite close to the smooth soul tune conjured by its title, and "Unfinished Sympathy" -- the group's first classic production -- is a tremendously moving fusion of up-tempo hip-hop and dancefloor jam with slow-moving, syrupy strings. Flaunting both their range and their tremendously evocative productions, Massive Attack recorded one of the best dance albums of all time”.
I want to end by sourcing from an extensive Pitchfork review from 2012 (they reviewed the box-set of Blue Lines):
“In fact, those Raw Like Sushi credits (Vowles' for programming, Del Naja's for co-writing "Manchild") were the only real music-industry bona fides any of the principal contributors to Blue Lines had going into it, aside from vocalists Shara Nelson and roots reggae veteran Horace Andy. But somehow the group realized a remarkable and seamless sonic identity. That's clear from the arresting opener "Safe From Harm", which spins an aggressive drumbeat, Del Naja's rap, Nelson's soulful vocals, and a mist of sustained minor-key synths around an intimidatingly muscular bass loop. From that moment, every major part of the Massive Attack profile is already present, from the collaging of genres to the spacious, nocturnal sonic environment to the heavy dose of paranoia that permeates it all.
They spend the rest of the album exploring variations on these themes. "One Love," with Andy on vocals, has a digital dancehall feel, a creepy-funky electric piano riff, and a scratched sample of a blaring horn section that predates Pharoahe Monch's "Simon Says" by almost a decade. "Daydreaming", with its scratchy breakbeat drums, is more directly hip-hop than most of the rest of the album, but the layers of atmospheric synthesizers and Tricky's felonious near-whisper make it clear that Massive Attack was up to something entirely different from what every other rap producer at the time was doing.
Blue Lines brought producers around to its unique vision. By the time Massive released Protection three years later, the group's renegade approach had been copied enough times to become a full-on movement. They'd go on to produce their masterpiece, Mezzanine, a couple of years after, but by then the project had already started to splinter. Tricky split from the collective after Protection to follow his own solo vision, while the core trio behind it would eventually burn out acrimoniously, with Vowles and then Marshall leaving Del Naja to produce increasingly less rewarding music under the group's name. Meanwhile, trip-hop in general had its edges polished off by genteel musicians who transformed it into soundtracks for fashionable hotel lobbies.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that Blue Lines was a startling record when it came out, and it remains one now. For this reissue it received a new mix and a new mastering job straight from the original tapes. It's available as a CD, in digital form in standard and high fidelity formats, and as a set of two LPs and a DVD of high resolution audio files. There aren't any bonus tracks, and aside from a reproduction promo poster in the vinyl edition there aren't any add-ons either. Frankly they'd just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it”.
I should have put Blue Lines in Vinyl Corner (I might have already done so thinking about it). That said, I would encourage people to own Blue Lines on vinyl as it such a phenomenal album that sound great on that format! From the epic and peerless Unfinish Sympathy to the phenomenal and intense opener of Safe from Harm, Blue Lines is a masterpiece! Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 8th April, I wanted to pay my respects and give my thanks to…
MASSIVE Attack’s spectacular debut.