What is Trip-hop? In order to understand it, we have to transfer ourselves to England, to be more precise to Bristol.
It is the 1980s, the DJ’s play to the overenthusiastic crowds in the clubs. LSD and ecstasy are easier to be bought than alcohol. Drugs are at the peak of their popularity, club music is still under way. DJs, graffiti painters, b-boys, namely the whole hip-hop community, are beginning to create the artistic-music formations. The fathers of trip-hop made up the line-up of The Wild Bunch, which was one of them. They were Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall, Andrew Vowels (the three founders of Massive Attack), Nellee Hooper (composer and producer) as well as Adrian Thaws (also known as Tricky). They combined rap with electronic music and some time later they diminished the beat pace.
The first success of the new style is associated with "Blue Lines", the debut album of the Massive Attack group with the famous hit "Unfinished Sympathy" which for a long time was in the group of the best ten hits in the British charts.
As the time passed by, it became customary to use the term of hip-hop not only as a reference to the combination of electronic music and rap, but also as the mixture with different genres of music, such as jazz, soul or reggae. The best example of acid-jazz is the group Portishead the orgins of which are also in Bristol.
These days, it is difficult to define what the music in question is. It needs to be approached very intuitively as relatively slow (80-120 BMP), gloomy and melancholic electronic music which is combined practically with any existing style.
Reggae style:
Indie style:
Classical music style: