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Nick Has a Problem...Seriously
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"Maxinquaye Turns 20 Today"


  

          

20 Years On: Tricky's Maxinquaye Revisited
David Bennun , February 20th, 2015

For a long time, I didn't listen to it. It was like a house you'd lived in, or your old school. Somewhere that for a while, an eventful and formative while, had seemed like the centre of the world. Then you move on, and other things happen. You lead a different life, become a different person. When you do go back, it's uncanny. In the Freudian sense: altogether familiar, altogether strange. It all seems so much smaller now, a place a whole other life occurred.

It wasn't just me. It's hard to recall, in our atomised era, but twenty years ago it was possible for an entire segment of culture to not only like, or love, but to inhabit an act. If you were one kind of music fan, Oasis were where you lived. (At that point, it sometimes felt like Oasis were where the whole country lived, whether it wanted to or not.) If you were another, you were Tricky's tenants. This may sound hyperbolic. It isn't. That truly was how it felt. It didn't mean you couldn't enjoy both - I did; so much so, in the case of Oasis, that I never forgave them for plodding again and again along the same path they briefly lit up with fiery footprints, until it was hollowed into a rut.

You couldn't accuse Tricky of that. The trouble was, others did the plodding for him. The pre-release tape of Maxinquaye with which, and within which, I spent the turn of the old year and the start of the next was so astonishingly new I had to keep replaying it just to check I hadn't fooled myself into my state of stupefaction. It would have the same effect across the country when it was released. Within a year or so, every other winsome college girl and her bleeping boyfriend would have formed a duo, turning out by the yard records which were to Maxinquaye what crabsticks are to crab.

Read rest here: http://thequietus.com/articles/17220-tricky-maxinquaye-review-interview


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Maxinquaye Turns 20
By Tom Breihan / February 20, 2015

The music critic Andy Pemberton coined the term “trip-hop” to describe an early DJ Shadow single, but I have this pet theory that the term caught on because nobody knew what the fuck else to do with Tricky. Smash-crash genre-blurring seemed like a revolutionary thing in the ’90s, in that moment before the internet made it clear that everyone could and would listen to everything. Beck and Cibo Matto and the mid-’90s Beastie Boys and the Orange-era Jon Spencer Blues Explosion all made great music, but they had the power of novelty working for them. Tricky’s Bristol forebears Massive Attack and Portishead did, too. It was fun to think that, in this dank little British city, people were finding ways to mash rap and dub reggae and Sade and Bond themes and Dusty Springfield torch songs into one dizzy, staggering whole. But there wasn’t anything fun about Tricky, and there didn’t seem to be anything calculated about his fusions. It might seem like an attention-grabbing move to cover Public Enemy’s “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos” as a damaged postpunk dirge, with a sultry woman whisper-crooning where Chuck D had boomed. If someone did it now, it would feel like transparent blog-bait. But Tricky did it without letting the seams show. From him, it felt like one more thing that had bubbled up from a fertile subconscious. And Maxinquaye, Tricky’s first album, released 20 years ago tomorrow, remains Tricky’s defining work because it’s the purest dive into that brain. Later, pigeonholing and expectations and the term “trip-hop” would come in and change everything. On Maxinquaye, he was all flickering possibility.

Read rest here: http://www.stereogum.com/1782387/maxinquaye-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/

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Falcons, Braves, Bulldogs and Hawks

Geto Boys, Poison Clan, UGK, Eightball & MJG, OutKast, Goodie Mob

  

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