These are just a few of the many big ideas tackled in Trip-Hop. With this lack of critical infrastructure, perhaps it was inevitable trip-hop would devolve into polite background music, or “music for standing around and looking cool.” Towards the end of the book in a chapter discussing urban decay and the subsequent gentrification of Brooklyn and the East Village, people simply couldn’t afford to throw edgy, underground experimental dance parties with skyrocketing rents. In many ways, trip-hop was both cause and effect of this cultural colonization. He summarizes the conflict in the book’s opening chapter, writing, “Another way to think about trip-hop is as a kind of aural gentrification, operating at one edge of hip-hop’s rise to global culture.” Wheaton argues that the name trip-hop was an attempt – whether unconscious or overt – to sanitize revolutionary Black music and make it more palatable to white audiences. There were already established traditions of experimental hip-hop, electronic music and dub. This is one of the central arguments of Trip-Hop: that it never really needed a new name at all.
There was also already a rich history of adventurous, far-out, experimental hip-hop, from the sampledelic turntablism of Afrika Bambaataa to the gothic Afrofuturism of Rammellzee. There are also some more obscure elements, like Lover’s Rock, a style of reggae popular in Bristol where much of the classic trip-hop originated from. This complicated lineage is partially due to trip-hop’s layered lineage, which owes almost as much to Detroit and acid techno as it does Jamaican dub. How can one summarize a genre that includes the neo-noir of Portishead the dubby militarism of Massive Attack the head-scratching beat collages of DJ Shadow and the jazzy instrumental hip-hop of labels like Ninja Tune. Even when it was coming out, trip-hop was never just one thing. Trip-Hop largely deals with the peculiar moody, downtempo, often psychedelic electronic music largely from the early ’90s to the early ’00s. It’s a detailed, authoritative, knowledgeable unpacking of a notoriously conflicting genre written by a diamond-keen cultural critic who’s not afraid to tackle nuanced, difficult topics while still singing the praises of music he loves to the high heavens. The music became not a means of community but as an instrument of commerce.” In these few short sentences, it’s obvious that Wheaton’s Trip-Hop is much more than a glowing puff-piece from a fawning fanboy. “If you want to know why musicians so loathed the term ‘trip-hop’ – or ‘illbient’ – it was that in the packaging of their music it allowed, instead of collectives, audiences and then, consumers. Wheaton observes the thorny trajectory of trip-hop from truly underground experimental music to lifestyle accessory – as well as the inherently complicated nature of the term. Towards the end of Trip-Hop, music and cultural critic R.J.
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