Massive Attack LANDMARK: Blue Lines by: Ed Butler Tue:29-Apr-08 Label: Virgin Year: 1991 WB rating 94 out of 100

Next Saturday morning, go down to the local café for breakfast and a coffee, and listen carefully. You hear that unobtrusive, inoffensive faux-electronic/hip hop/ambient drivel that, for some inexplicable reason, doesn’t drive diners to their wits end with its inane derivativeness? You can blame Massive Attack for that. You can blame Massive Attack for those friends of yours who trot out Ministry of Sound Chill Out Sessions at dinner parties, portentously proclaiming that ‘this record is so fucking awesome’. You can blame Massive Attack for Moby. But despite this, listening to Blue Lines, it doesn’t feel fair. It’s too good.

Massive Attack’s debut was a revelation in 1991, the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s black album, and Pavement’s slacker classic Slanted and Enchanted. British hip hop was essentially an oxymoron. It was into this environment that Blue Lines established itself as possibly the greatest down-tempo album ever.

Blue Lines was so influential, in fact, that it created a new notion of cool. The urban-grime chic of Bristol slums from which Massive Attack emerged drove the record to be heard in cafes and bars worldwide. Credited producers ‘The Wild Bunch’ were a loosely associated collective – read: gang – from the backstreets of a downtrodden British backwater. The very phrase ‘urban music’ effectively didn’t exist in 1990. It was, despite the soaring strings, funky grooves and Shara Nelson’s exquisite vocals, dangerous, almost illicit, in its association with the seedier sides of British suburbia. But all the cool in the world couldn’t conceal the incredible music on display.

Genres of music, and specifically, their origins, are often the subject of great and fierce debate. Were Sabbath the original metal band, or was Zeppelin’s blues the moment of genesis? Or was it The Beatles’ distorted feedback intro to ‘I Feel Fine’? Did Kraftwerk’s electronic drones begin dance music, or was it Can’s driving repetition that kick-started the movement? Across all musical tastes, there is disagreement. Except trip-hop. When it comes to trip-hop, Blue Lines is ground zero.

Tricky’s grainy, murderous rhymes and a Sly and Robbie sample aside, there is almost nothing that equates Blue Lines with hip hop of the time. From the opening, driving bassline of lead single ‘Safe From Harm’, the album was a velvety shock to the system for music fans of the day; when raw and angry was de rigueur, this was crisply produced, smooth and seductive, vocals were clear and utterly pitch perfect, beats were back in the mix, allowing melody and inventive musical flourishes to propel songs to a higher level than any pretenders riding their coattails.

The ultra-smooth, reggae-influenced rhythm section of ‘Five Man Army’, the sinister blues-lounge suite of ‘Blue Lines’ and bottom-end soul of ‘Daydreaming’ remain as unique today as they were when they first appeared – Tricky’s lifting of the refrain from ‘If I Was a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof only one example of the consistently surprising and thrilling inventiveness that permeates almost every second of the album’s nine tracks. And this is yet to mention the song that is revered by many as the greatest song of the 90s, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. Setting aside the whimsically clever title, the tinkling bells and swelling strings should be enough to capture the doubters’ imaginations. And then Shara Nelson’s heartbreakingly beautiful voice, accompanied by some scratchy turntable work and a gentle piano coda, thrusts the song from merely catchy and pretty to utterly transformative, a moment in time, never to be repeated.

So next time you’re cursing over your porridge, the horrid, homogeneous sounds emerging scratchily from the speakers at your local breakfast bar, spare a moment to recall its root cause. Yes, a lot of turgid crap spawned from Massive Attack’s primordial soup, but so too did Air, Portishead, Zero 7, DJ Shadow, Lamb, The Gathering, Timbaland, Asian Dub Foundation, and even Radiohead. Blue Lines, the alpha and omega of slow motion hip hop, so wonderful that all the derivative garbage in the world – and there is quite a pile – and all the truly awful ‘Chillout Sessions’ compilations are a fair price to pay.