The Friday Canon: TRIP-HOP BATTLE

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

It's Bristol! It's the Nineties! What are the kidz listening to on their 'walk-mans' on the back seat of the bus? Well, East 17 probably, but who was the real winner of the Wess Cunnry Coffee Table war? You have EIGHT ticks to dish out between Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky's UK Top 40 hits.

[Poll #1119484]
Manic Street Preachers: (link)
1. Motorcycle Emptiness
2. You Love Us
=3. Faster / PCP
=3. Little Baby Nothing
5. A Design For Life
=6. Everything Must Go
=6. La Tristesse Durera
8. From Despair To Where
9. Kevin Carter
=10. Revol
=10. Roses In The Hospital
=10. Theme From M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless)

NB: This canon was meant to be put up in December, but I forgot. Look out for all-new Friday poll action next week!

Comments

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

This was hard to narrow down to 8 ticks. Even though I've never felt really passionate about any of these acts. They inspire respect rather than love I think.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Someone explain Tricky to me. I only know the stuff he did with Massive Attack.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Appeal of Tricky = largely Martina (girlfriend, singer and muse, picked up as an 18-year-old public school girl skiving school). Her voice was amazing, so laconic and botherd. His own lazy drawl isn't unappealing either, and he always had a knack for a memorable line - I didn't tick it because 'Glory Box' uses the sample better but 'Hell Is Round The Corner' is a great example of this, the rhymes just flow so naturally, "juice me, seduce me, dress me up in Stussy" plus that amazing "we're hungry, beware of our appetite/distant drums bring the news of a kill tonight" couplet. Also 'Tricky Kid' which, until 'Piece Of Me', was the most paranoid fame song I'd heard: "Haile Selassie I! They look after I!"

Maxinquaye is a really varied album: you have swooning bliss on 'Overcome', paranoid soul on 'You Don't', rock on 'Black Steel', amazing looped beats on 'Ponderosa'...you could probably put together a magnificent album out of his best post-Maxinquaye tracks too, though the albums are all a slog. Search esp 'Broken Homes' with PJ Harvey and 'Excess' with, of all people, Alanis Morissette.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Aw trip-hop! Trip-hop was my default listening as a teenager. As well as the trip-hop trinity I own or have owned albums/singles by:

Ruby
Shara Nelson
Nicolette
Olive
Earthling (this was shit even then)
Morcheeba
Moloko
Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra (Ragga = the girl on 'You Don't' by Tricky)
Ingrid Schroeder
Coco & The Bean
Sneaker Pimps
and Martina Topley-Bird's solo album.

and also one you forgot Kat - Nearly God, Tricky's 1996 side project ft. Bjork, Alison Moyet, Neneh Cherry, some other people. I wouldn't have ticked the single, 'Poems', but 'I Be The Prophet' was amazing.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

There is no way that Olive = trip-hop! They are trip-jungle!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Martina Topley-Bird just sounds like it is a completely made-up name from FHM or Nuts or something.

I liked Morcheeba and Moloko.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

'Earthling (this was shit even then)'

'Nefisa' is good!

[martinv.livejournal.com]

Is Topley-Bird any good? A band I like but you really wouldn't so I won't mention did a great cover of 'Too Tough To Die' and I've never heard her original. Should I listen to her?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Portishead was the constant soundtrack at the height of my goth phase. I would wear a black velvet floppy hat and wail along to "cos nobody loooooooves meeeeee it's truuuuuuuue, not like youuuuuu dooooooo" in my bedroom.

I turned out ok though!

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Goth.

[cis.livejournal.com]

my brother still tells the story of me, one day, turning to the radio and saying 'of course no-one loves you, you're a whiny bint.'

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Tricky's Black Steel is actually better than the original.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

well it's kind of martina's vocal what makes it, but YES, AGREEMENT HERE :)

[zenith.livejournal.com]

Tricky was so iconic, effortlessly so much cooler and more fascinating than the others - and his contrarian bloody-mindedness helped rather than hindered for a while (anyone else remember him vehemently siding with Jacko rather than Cocker after the Brits?) - but at the end of the day, his discography has the most dross in it. Shame.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I know bug all about trip-hop and am sort of happy for this to continue - bluddy teenagers, if you're going to be goths do it PROPERLY with a pint of snakebit and black innit.

I think I liked one Portishead song though, it's the one I have on twelve inch record, it's the OTHER one which isn't the nobody looooves me one. ?

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

I rly want to hear Tricky covering 'This Corrosion' now.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

'Safe From Harm' beating 'Unfinished Sympathy' - wow and hurrah! Not that I don't love the latter - another couple of ticks and I'd've ticked it - but it's always been the inferior Shara Nelson track to me. She just sounds stronger on 'Safe From Harm'. Blue Lines is probably the weakest of their three good albums actually (I refuse to acknowledge 100th Window), but the best cuts off Protection and Mezzanine weren't the singles (viz: 'Better Things', 'Inertia Creeps', 'Group Four').

Portishead's second album was pretty great, too. Despite its coffee table rep, Dummy sounded pretty fucked-up and weird to me when I first heard it; Portishead is even more strung-out. 'Half Day Closing' is incredible.

[martinv.livejournal.com]

Unfinished Sympathy is great but everyone has heard it far too many times. Or at least I have, hence my lack of tick.

I thought Inertia Creeps was a single, and was surprised not to see it here. Maybe it didn't chart?

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

Portishead's Cowboy was a single wasn't it? I remember coz it had no mention of the song title anywhere on the record or the sleeve.

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

Ah, maybe because it was a promo. It would've got a tick from me.

[martinv.livejournal.com]

Used to hate all of this. My bad. Recently come round to Portishead (in a big way) and Massive Attack. Still heard very little Tricky.

I only ticked Live With Me because of the Twilight Singers cover. Ahem.

[umlauts.livejournal.com]

There's really barely a bad song on this. The last two MA singles are bad but in fact all of Tricky's charting singles are good - I mean, I didn't even tick "Broken Homes" which is GREAT.

I think "Over" is one of PH's most unsung classics, though the singles choices off that album were ridiculously bad. I mean, hello, "Seven Months", people.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah 'Broken Homes' should really not be languishing on 0 ticks.

[koganbot]

I'm one of those classic carpetbaggers who comes in and ticks the two titles he recognizes, skewing the statistics. (But I once even put Tricky on a blindfold test, so I ought to have had greater name recognition with his songs.)

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

Based on the Portishead show in December, I think the new album is going to be rather awesome. One or two tracks were quite pop-sounding as well. Yaaay. Portishead are back!

Not a single baby must die Irish priests killing babies who are dying babies babies babies

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd have bothered to buy 100th Window if someone hadn't bought it for me - but it's not that bad! In an ambient kind of way. Sinead O Connor is an utter mental (see subject of this post) but the album as a whole was very good music to fall asleep to during my exams. ie I couldn't tell one track from another.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I always liked the idea of trip hop better than the reality. I had the first Massive Attack album and really only listened to the two Shara Nelson singles, ditto the one track from Portishead. Am only down d/ling Maxinquaye. (Just never got around to it.)

[spazhammer.livejournal.com]

hymn of the big wheel pisses all over *everything* else by all three bands from a great height. and the nellee hooper mix takes it even further.

and if you like tricky, check out the stuff he did with whale. "i cant help if i wanna fumble/sarah cracknell up her channel tunnel"

genius :)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Finally one of these I can actually do. ^^;

where did triphop go in the end?

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Tentative answer: commercial apotheosis in DIDO?

The triphop = goth truth mentioned here is surprisingly undermentioned isn't it? Playing through these things now I notice they are not notably, erm, chirpy or cheery. That reminds me somehow (ok I've had a pint of red wine) of Emilíana Torrini*'s "Unemployed in Summertime" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30x3DJodf2E) (number 63 for one week in 2000, UK chart fans), which is unapologetically carefree while clearly in the triphop slipstream soundwise.

(And plus also I just noticed (rambling away from core subject here, sorry) that the colour scheme** of this vid is similar to UK top-two hit "Put Your Records On" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVNK_VDQY8I) which though nohow triphop to me falls in the same ahem chickhit feelgood department; has any critic/analyst/writer ever gone seriously into colour choices for different genres in videos, photos, covers etc?)

*) sang "Gollum's Song", the end theme of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers after fellow Icelander Björk had to cancel for reasons of pregnancy

**) if this is incorrect I shall not argue, have red/green colourblindness