Blue Lines

Listening to Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, 21 years after its initial release is like reading an old William Gibson novel that describes the then-near future, which is now the present, with unsettling precision. Nearly every song offers a sound currently in use in music's taste-making leading edge. Robert "3D" Del Naja's chopped-up vocals on the album-opening "Safe From Harm" sound freakishly like the chorus to Kanye et al's "Mercy" (even if Ye actually lifted it from DJ Screw, who was developing his idiosyncratic style 5,000 miles away from Bristol, England at almost the exact same time Massive were recording Blue Lines). The chunky, palm-muted guitar riff on "One Love" is almost identical to the one on "Ahh Shit" from Jeremih's brilliant Late Nights with Jeremih. The subzero space-reggae beat to "Five Man Army" could easily be a highlight of any number of fashionable rappers' mixtapes.

When Del Najas, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles were recording Blue Lines, the sub-genre called trip-hop hadn't been invented. But at its heart, Blue Lines is a hip-hop record, although one marbled with streaks of soul, dub, dance music, and psychedelic rock. The fact that its primary audience in America was made up largely of ravers and alternative rockers doesn't change that. And their accomplishments stand out even further next to what was happening elsewhere in the hip-hop world at the time. Straight Outta Compton, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Paul's Boutique, and 3 Feet High and Rising were all still just a few of years old in 1991, and so was the idea of beatmaking as an art unto itself. The blocky rhythms and minimal arrangements that defined rap's identity in the 1980s were just starting to be replaced by the deep, organic textures that would define its 90s, and Blue Lines was at the forefront.

Credit: Pitchfork