{"id":124442,"date":"2018-04-20T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124442"},"modified":"2018-04-20T10:41:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T14:41:22","slug":"twenty-years-later-on-massive-attack-and-mezzanine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/20\/twenty-years-later-on-massive-attack-and-mezzanine\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Years Later: On Massive Attack and Mezzanine<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1998, when I was a writer for Vibe<\/em> magazine (which was the leading black culture journal), I went to London to interview the trip-hop kings Massive Attack. They were preparing to release their third album, the beautifully complex and brooding Mezzanine<\/em>. Although they collaborated with other singers and musicians, the core Massive trio consisted of Grant \u201cDaddy G\u201d Marshall, Andy \u201cMushroom\u201d Vowles, and Robert \u201c3D\u201d Del Naja. Del Naja penned most of the Dadaistic lyrics on Mezzanine<\/em> and thought of its title.<\/p>\n

As a pop journalist, I had already covered their contemporaries Portishead and Tricky, so of course I felt it was my duty and destiny to fly to London to cover\u00a0Mezannine<\/em>. I had to beg the cornball editor in chief to send me, and in the end, the story was never published. But I never forgot the experience of sitting with Massive, trying to refrain from being too much of a fanboy. The year before, when I\u2019d visited Paris, I\u2019d taken Blue Lines<\/em> along to serve as my soundtrack of the city. Me and my beautiful homegirl Wendy Washington rode out to the Palace of Versailles as Massive\u2019s remake of the soul classic \u201cBe Thankful for What You Got\u201d blared from the speakers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMezzanine<\/em> is that place in between, when you\u2019re not sure if it\u2019s yesterday or today,\u201d Del Naja told me at Olympic Studios in London. \u201cThat little space where it\u2019s quite scary and erotic.\u201d Also known as an excellent graffitist and painter (inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat) and rumored to be<\/a> the mysterious street artist Banksy (a claim he denied), Del Naja had seemingly become the leader of the group. He was its resident auteur, and his Francis Bacon view of the world was visible in the band\u2019s videos, album designs, and stage lighting.<\/p>\n

The band first came together in their hometown of Bristol. Though Del Naja was shorter than the lanky Daddy G or the equally tall Mushroom, who were both somewhat reserved, his presence towered over the group, and it caused an earthquake break between the brotherhood. \u201cWhen we got together to record, we realized the amount of creative friction between us,\u201d Mushroom would confess later. \u201cIn fact, we wound up recording in separate studios.\u201d The producer Neil Davidge later described the process as \u201cmessy,\u201d but from that angst, tension, and messiness, Massive Attack delivered a masterpiece.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall, and Andrew Vowles in 1998.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mezzanine, <\/em>which celebrates its twentieth\u00a0anniversary on April 20, was a departure from the gritty electronica of Massive Attack\u2019s first two projects,\u00a0Blue Lines<\/em> and Protection<\/em>. It incorporates more rock elements, including a newly hired band with the guitarist Angelo Bruschini, formerly of the New Wave band the Numbers, leading the charge and change. Mezzanine<\/em>\u00a0is an album best listened to loud, preferably on earphones, to properly hear the layers of weirdness and rhythms, a soulful sound collage that was miles away from the \u201cParklifes\u201d and \u201cChampagne Supernovas\u201d of their Brit-pop contemporaries Blur and Oasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning, the sampler was our main musical instrument,\u201d Daddy G said in his slight West Indian accent. \u201cWhen we first formed Massive Attack, basically we were DJs who went into the studio with our favorite records and created tracks. At the time, we tried to rip off the entire style of American hip-hop performers, but we realized, as artists, it\u2019s important to be yourself. We realized it made no sense for us to talk about the South Bronx. Slowly but surely, we had to reclaim our identities as Brit artists who wanted to do something different with our music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Massive Attack unintentionally kicked off a new British Invasion in the nineties that was as powerful as the Beatles in the sixties, Led Zeppelin in the seventies, or Duran Duran in the eighties. Beginning with their sophisticated debut,\u00a0Blue Lines<\/em>, which featured the vocalist Shara Nelson on the masterful \u201cUnfinished Sympathy\u201d and \u201cSafe from Harm,\u201d there was something special about their blunted cinematic (Martin Scorsese was another hero) sound that had a paranoid artfulness. For me, having long grown bored with the stunted growth of many American rap artists during that era of \u201cjiggy\u201d materialism and thug tales of nineties rap, their slowed-down music (tape loops, samples, and beats) created an often dreamy, sometimes nightmarish sound that was fresh and futuristic. The author Will Self called it a \u201csinuous, sensual, subversive soundscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blue Lines<\/em> was accessible avant-garde and comprehensible experimentation. From first listen, I could tell they were as inspired by the pioneering producers Marley Marl, Lee \u201cScratch\u201d Perry, and Prince as they were by Burt Bacharach, John Barry, and Brian Eno. The trip-hop<\/em> label was bestowed on the group by the Brit journalist Jonathan Taylor to describe the trippy music that was simultaneously street and psychedelic. Trip-hop<\/em> was a tag that, like jazz<\/em>, was often rejected by the practitioners, but it fit perfectly. A few years later, when I started contributing short fiction to the Brown Sugar<\/em> erotica series, I imagined the stories as textual films, and it was Massive Attack that supplied the seductive score.<\/p>\n

\u201cAngel,\u201d the third single from Mezzanine<\/em>, would go on to become one of their most licensed songs, used for the opening credits of the series House <\/em>as well as by the director George Miller in Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em>. Over the years, Massive Attack\u2019s music has been used in many movies (Pi<\/em>, The Matrix<\/em>, The Insider<\/em>) and television programs (Luther<\/em>, True Blood<\/em>, Power<\/em>). The videos for their own songs, including the four singles from Mezzanine<\/em> (\u201cRisingson,\u201d \u201cTeardrop,\u201d \u201cAngel,\u201d and \u201cInertia Creeps\u201d), were always sinister and disturbing.\u00a0Massive\u2019s hybrid music achieved pop-cult status, selling millions of copies while still being critically lauded.<\/p>\n

Yet in 1998, at least, the group itself was still somewhat anonymous. They could walk around the city without being bothered. Mushroom and I popped out of the studio and went to a juice stand. He told me about his years living in New York, where he was the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Devastating Tito from the rap group the Fearless Four. \u201cHave you ever heard of them?\u201d he asked shyly. When I told him my best friend Jerry Rodriguez had directed their video for \u201cProblems of the World\u201d in 1983, Mushroom smiled. \u201cFinally,\u201d he replied, \u201csomeone who knows about the old school.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d followed hip-hop culture since my teenage years. I\u2019d grown up in Harlem, watched break-dancers spin on their skulls in the subway station or Times Square, and experienced the pre-record mid-seventies period when MCs and DJs played in public parks, block parties, and fire trap clubs in the hood. In my opinion, no film depicts that era better than\u00a0Wild Style<\/em> (1983). Directed by Charlie Ahearn but guided by the b-boy insight and vision of Fab Five Freddy, it provided a close look at a new culture. As the writer Phil Johnson points out in his seminal book Straight Outa Bristol: Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky and the Roots of Trip-Hop<\/em> (1997), that was the film that inspired the posse to start making music in the first place.<\/p>\n

In the beginning, turntables were their only instruments. By the time Mezzanine<\/em> was released, Mushroom had decided that he was leaving the group, supposedly because he thought the music had strayed too far from its sampling, turntablist foundation. \u201cWhen we recorded Blue Lines<\/em>, we just wanted to make an album for ourselves,\u201d Mushroom said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t care about the record company or the listeners, we just wanted to make ourselves happy. That\u2019s all changed now.\u201d As though to make his point and protest visual, in the spooky video for Mezzanine<\/em>\u2019s first single \u201cRisingson<\/a>,\u201d Mushroom sits on a couch watching a 12-inch record spinning on a portable turntable. Leaning over slightly, he stares into the black vinyl grooves oblivious to the musicians playing in the same room.<\/p>\n

These days, there are still a few nineties albums I play regularly, such as Never Mind<\/em> (Nirvana) Life After Death<\/em> (Biggie Smalls), Brown Sugar <\/em>(D\u2019Angelo) and excellence that was Mezzanine.<\/em> Twenty years later, that album still sounds like tomorrow.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales writes<\/em> the Blacklist book column<\/a> for <\/em>Catapult and has contributed essays to <\/em>New York,<\/em> The Village Voice,<\/em> Wax Poetics, and <\/em>Pitchfork.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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