The Massive Attack, Bristol and the song behind the trip-hop

Like other musicians before them, also i Massive Attack they have Their music has been withdrawn from Spotify To protest against the founder’s investments Daniel Ek in military artificial intelligence society Helsing. They also announced that they had joined No Music for Genocidea group of over 400 artists and record labels that blocked their music from streaming services in Israel.

In this regard, the Bristol group has released a declaration in which we read: “Not being connected to this initiative and in the light of the significant investments of their CEO in a company that produces military drones and artificial intelligence technology integrated in combat planes, the Massive Attacks have presented a separate request to our label so that our music is removed from the SPOTIFY streaming service in all territories. The historian of an effective action by artists during Apartheid in South Africa and Apartheid, the war crimes and the genocide now committed by the state of Israel make the “No Music for Genocide” campaign a imperative. Creative of musicians end up financing lethal and dystopian technologies.

For their part, Spotify And Helsing They replied saying: “Spotify and Helsing are two totally separate companies,” said Spotify, adding that Helsing, of which Ek is president “is not involved in Gaza” and his efforts were “focused on the defense of Europe in Ukraine”. The company in question said: “We are currently witnessing the dissemination of incorrect information according to which Helsing technology would be used in war zones other than Ukraine. This is not correct. Our technology is used in European countries only for the purpose of deterrence and defense against Russian aggression in Ukraine”.

The position of the Massive Attack it is significant as I am the first group of a major to get out of Spotify. This means that they will not be able to use Bandcamp, which is reserved for independent artists. However, they have their own website. There are also other streaming services that do not invest in military technology.

The following is the story of how i Massive Attack have become the Massive Attackof how “Blue Lines” It is one of the key albums of the entire nineties and how a song more than others has contributed to making history.

Shara Nelson It was halfway through the vocal recordings to the coach House Studios of Bristol, when the melody and the text of what would become “Unfinished Sympathy”. It was the summer of 1990 and Nelson was the guest singer of the debut album of the Massive Attack “Blue Lines”. The trip-hop collective (but at the time this definition had not yet been coined) formed in 1988 composed of Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall And Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles.

The day he was born “Unfinished Sympathy”they had struggled to record a song entitled “Safe from Harm”. Shara remembered it in an interview granted to the UNCUT magazine in 2010. “I could not focus very well. So they told us to take a break and to drink a cup of tea. I didn’t drink tea, so I started in a corner and I started trying to put together this idea that blended me in the head for a while. Imagine Love Before ‘.

At that moment, in the studio with Shara there were the manufacturer
Jonathan “Jonny Dollar” Sharp
And
Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles
. Nelson still remembers what happened: “Mushroom heard what I was doing and said: ‘What is it? Girl, sings.’ So I started singing, Mushroom added some rhythm and Jonny Dollar began to play synthetic arches, that’s all.

The song, co-founded by Nelson, Vowels, Del Naja, Marshall and Dollar, would have been the second single of the album. The song was accompanied by an avant -garde video that projected i
Massive Attack
And the entire Bristol music scene to the attention of the whole world.

Yes, Bristol’s music scene, a city of just over 400,000 inhabitants, the roots whose sound can be traced back to April 2, 1980, when the police raided the black and white cafe in the St Pauls neighborhood. The pressure made at that time by the police reached a critical point, triggering a revolt due to racial tensions and the controversial Sus law (from “Suspected person”) which allowed a police officer to stop, search and potentially arrest people considered suspicious. The wave of anger of the community of St Pauls took the police by surprise, who soon found himself in numerical inferiority. Following the revolt, the police loose the grip on St Pauls creating the conditions for which the communities were able to organize improvised parties on the street bringing audio plants. These plants provided the musical background in the center of Bristol and would become a unifying force for the young people of the city, regardless of the color of their skin.

The producer and DJs of Jamaican origin, grown in Bristol,
Roni size
In the 2016 BBC documentary
‘Unfinished: The
Making of Massive Attack ‘
He explained: “The culture of sound system was all focused on do it yourself. It was a question of learning how to mount the amplifiers, how to correctly load the speakers on the van, even learn to drive a large truck in the narrow roads of St. Pauls.”

The culture of Sound System shared a do-it-yourself ethics with punk and there was a post-punk band of Bristol, i Pop groupwhich would have had a huge influence on the development of Bristol’s sound. The sound of the pop groups was aggressive and avant -garde, had in itself funk, free jazz and dub elements. He went to play in New York, they were fascinated by the nascent hip-hop culture, as mentioned by the former singer and founder Mark Stewart in ‘Unfinished’: “We lived practically in New York. Suddenly, someone says that there is a truly cool radio program on this thing called Kiss FM and WBLS. Then we had large blaster ghetto with double cassette recorders. We copied these cassettes and brought them back to Bristol. We copied, we copied, we copied. he had not even noticed. “

In the mid -1980s, Bristol’s scene was flourishing and his epicenter was Dugout, where the Wild Bunch They performed regularly and dominated the Bristol club scene. In 1988, i Massive Attack I was born as a spin-off of Wild Bunch and understood Daddy G, Mushroom, 3D and, to the beginning, Tricky. 3D he had been co -author of “Manchild” Of Neneh Cherry. Together with her husband, the composer and producer Cameron McVayCherry helped i Massive Attack to record “Blue Lines”to which they started working in 1990. Sheryl Garrattformer director of The Face, said: “One of the reasons that made the Massive Attacks the phenomenon that were the meeting with Neneh Cherry and Cameron Mcvay. They supported them financially, gave them many resources, encouraged them and cultivated their talent.”

Despite their talent, i
Massive Attack
They were not guided by ambition or by the desire to become famous. “We were bristol lazings,” he reported
Daddy g
At The Observer in 2004. “It was Neneh Cherry who kicked us in the ass and let us enter the studio. We recorded a lot at his home, in his child’s room … what we tried to do was to create dance music for the head, rather than for the feet. I think it is our freshest album, we were at best of our strength at that moment.”

At that time, the sound that the musical journalist
Andy Pemberton
He would have defined “trip-hop” in the June 1994 issue of Mixmag magazine was taking shape, a fusion of New York hip-hop with dubs, soul, funk, jazz and electronics, all steeped in a melancholy and relaxed atmosphere. This was the sound he would distinguish
“Blue Lines”
and that would emerge for the first time in
“Unfinished Sympathy”
published as a single two months before the release of the album in April 1991. “‘Blue Lines’ had such an impact that they recognized the Bristol sound”, he still remembers

Roni size
in
‘Unfinished’
. “It was that basic sub-low sub-low. They were the hip-hop breaks and the two merged perfectly. I think the massive attacks really drawn you.”

Once Mushroom, Nelson and the Dollar manufacturer had the foundations of the vocal melody and the text of Nelson, the Massive Attack They worked on the song during a jam session. The title “Unfinished Sympathy” It was decided that same day. “I hate giving a title to anything without a theme,” he said Robert Del Naja At the Select magazine in 1992. “At the beginning the title came out as a joke, but it adapted perfectly to the song and the arrangements that we could not help but use it.”

One of the main decisions taken in the early stages of the song was to use a real orchestra. “Synth played too tacky,” he said Mushroom In Sounds in 1991. “So we thought of using real arches”. Dollar contacted the music producer Wil Malone To arrange and direct the arches, which were recorded in the Two study of the Abbey Road Studios in London. An orchestra of 42 elements was hired to perform the arrangement of arches. Dollar had told Malone to do what he wanted with the arrangement of arches. “My approach to” Unfinished Sympathy “was to create a truly open song,” Malone said to Uncut magazine. “In practice it is only a groove, keyboards and the splendid voice of Shara Nelson. In most of the arches of arches that I realize, the arches are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words, they are so silent that they do not really feel them, or they are mixed, so that you can only feel the main lines. But in” Unfinished Sympathy “, the arches are exposed. different.” The Massive Attack had never thought of using a complete orchestra for the album, they had not foreseen a budget for this operation. Mushroom had to sell his car to cover all the orchestra’s engagement costs.

“Unfinished Sympathy” He went out on 11 February 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War. On the advice of their record company and management, the group eliminated the word “attack” from the name, presumably to prevent the song from being banned by the BBC, publishing the song simply as “Massive”. He had a good success, reaching thirteenth place in the ranking of individuals in Great Britain. The criticism uncertain, the trip hop was born.