Postcolonial Heavy Lifting
The Massive Attack Legacy
By Charlie Bertsch
It’s a great time to revisit the catalogue of Massive Attack.
The influence their trip-hop had on subsequent popular music impedes our understanding of its initial impact.
Trip-hop’s genes can be discerned in everything from mainstream rap, to alternative rock, and electronic dance music. When artists in different genres use the same aesthetic as inspiration, its impact is diluted over time, covering a bigger territory but with diminished intensity.
But when Massive Attack were peaking in the mid-1990s, their sound was more distinctive.
While their approach to making music was similar to that of leaders in the rave scene that exploded at the end of the 1980s – featuring prominent samples, electronic percussion, and female vocalists who counterbalanced its more robotic elements – their songs were not made just for the dance floor.
By slowing the tempo down and prioritising the sonic filigree that disappears when tracks are scaled for the club, Massive Attack and their fellow Bristol group Portishead turned the slapdash collages of early EDM into headphone fare.
Massive Attack teaches with form rather than content.
“Karmacoma” from their second album Protection is a perfect example, coupling a shuffling dub rhythm with the laid-back rapping of Tricky and 3D against a backdrop of world music samples that deftly walk the line between respectful citation and insouciant decontextualisation.
Another one of Massive Attack’s most representative songs is “Teardrop” from their third album Mezzanine.
Deploying the Cocteau Twins Elizabeth Fraser as their chanteuse du jour, “Teardrop” is pop minimalism at its finest: metronomic clicks, the crackling of a dusty vinyl groove, and spare arpeggios that sound like a digital harpsichord provide just enough of a scaffold for her fairy-like voice to wrap itself down.
Although a pared-down version of the original group have continued touring, the impact of tracks like these mean Massive Attack will forever be identified with the mid-1990s.
But that identification with a memorable period is precisely what makes Massive Attack so relevant today. Because their records clearly come from a place away from our own times, they can help us discern aspects of our world that are otherwise difficult to perceive.
I remember vividly when I fell in love with Massive Attack.
It was the fall of 1994. After being shocked by the way that alternative rock and rap had taken over the industry in a few short years, I was beginning to sour on those genres.
Although I was still excited when my favourite artists released new material, the fact that it was increasingly drowned out by less challenging music made my appreciation bittersweet.
So did the depressing political turn in the United States, as the excitement that accompanied Bill Clinton’s arrival in the White House had given way to the realisation that he would turn his back on the progressives who had helped get him elected.
The Republican Party had made a fierce counter-attack on Clinton’s grand designs, exemplified by Congressman Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and the reactionary talk radio that had paved the way for it.
I needed something that didn’t sound like reheated leftovers. And I needed something that didn’t sound American.
Protection fits the bill perfectly.
Not only did the group’s slowed-down, bottom-heavy sound repudiate the increasingly formulaic “new” music being played on American radio and television. It also transformed the way I thought about British culture.
Instead of mirroring the popular culture of my homeland back to me in a pale imitation of its multicultural riches, Massive Attack forcefully reminded me that the post-colonial United Kingdom had become a place where the legacy of racism could be confronted head-on.
By 1994, I had been reading the work of the great Stuart Hall for years. Yet I had inexplicably overlooked the racial dimension to his writing, focusing instead on the way that he managed to combine the homegrown Marxism exemplified by his mentor Raymond Williams with continental theorists favoured by post-structuralists.
Looking back on that time, I recognise that my mind was constrained by conceptions that had long outgrown their usefulness. Because I had grown up watching British television on PBS stations and because I had spent a year in Europe following high school, I thought I understood it better than most of my compatriots.
The truth was that my picture of the UK was distorted by film and television shows that reflected its long-standing class divisions, but largely ignored the racial dynamics that complicated them.
Massive Attack broke that picture into a million pieces and reassembled them into an image of a society where immigrants do the cultural heavy lifting.
In retrospect, I could have – and should have – been able to perceive this from the popularity of ska and reggae in the UK. But outdated stereotypes die hard.
What set Massive Attack apart was how they synthesised disparate material into music that broke new ground.
They weren’t doing a British imitation of American rock and roll or Jamaican reggae. Rather they were demonstrating how a “version” – to use the parlance of dub culture – can stand proudly on its own, regardless of the material it is repurposing.
Again, for those people who were already conversant in the legacies of ska, dub, and reggae at the time, none of this would have come as a surprise.
But for those of us who lacked that in-depth knowledge, the impact of Massive Attack’s work in the 1990s was, well, massive.
Purists in that era may have looked down upon the impulse to produce crossover culture. Yet it was only through such attempts to go beyond the tightly circumscribed world of experts that the music that influenced those artists like Massive Attack was able to reach a mainstream audience.
Listening to Massive Attack today is a great way to remember that translational labour.
At a time when the social achievements of the 1990s are in danger of being rescinded – and possibly altogether erased from the history books – listening to the soundtrack of that progress can be a powerful source of solace.
Immersing oneself in a record album isn’t going to do anything by itself to improve the political situation. Yet that pursuit need not devolve into escapism.
By encouraging us to slow down and pay attention, to hear how seemingly incompatible parts can come together into a musically coherent whole, Massive Attack provide a powerful counter-example to the cynical defeatism of those who have concluded that it’s sheer folly to work towards a more inclusive society.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.