Blue Lines (1991)

Blue Lines is the debut studio album by English electronic music group Massive Attack, released on 8 April 1991 by Wild Bunch and Virgin Records. The recording was led by members Grantley "Daddy G" Marshall, Robert "3D" Del Naja, Adrian "Tricky" Thaws, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles, with co-writing and co-production by Jonny Dollar. It also features contributions by singers Shara Nelson and Horace Andy. Generally regarded as the first "trip hop" album, Blue Lines blended elements of hip-hop (such as breakbeats, sampling, and rapping) with dub, soul, reggae, and electronic music.

Blue Lines was named the 21st greatest album of all time in a 1997 "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, The Guardian and Classic FM. In 2000, Q readers placed it at number 9 in the magazine's poll of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever". In 2003, the album was included on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" and again in 2012 and 2020. Pitchfork ranked it at number 85 in its list of "The Top 100 Albums of the 1990s".

A remastered version of the album was released on 19 November 2012.

Background

"We worked on Blue Lines for about eight months, with breaks for Christmas and the World Cup," said Robert "3D" Del Naja, "but we started out with a selection of ideas that were up to seven years old. Songs like 'Safe from Harm' and 'Lately' had been around for a while, from when we were The Wild Bunch, or from our time on the sound systems in Bristol. But the more we worked on them, the more we began to conceive new ideas too – like, 'Five Man Army' came together as a jam." The group also drew inspiration from concept albums in various genres by artists such as Pink Floyd, Public Image Ltd, Billy Cobham, Wally Badarou, Herbie Hancock and Isaac Hayes.

Daddy G said about the making of the album:

We were lazy Bristol twats. It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio. We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room. It stank for months and eventually we found a dirty nappy behind a radiator. I was still DJing, but what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then.

The font used on the cover of the album is Helvetica Black Oblique. Del Naja has acknowledged the influence of the inflammable material logo used on the cover of Stiff Little Fingers' album Inflammable Material.

Composition

Blue Lines is generally considered the first trip hop album, although the term was not widely used before 1994. A fusion of electronic music, hip-hop, dub, 1970s soul and reggae, it established Massive Attack as one of the most innovative British bands of the 1990s and the founder of trip hop's Bristol sound. AllMusic's John Bush also affirmed the album as the "first masterpiece" of what later became known as trip hop, and described it as "filter[ing] American hip-hop through the lens of British club culture, a stylish, nocturnal sense of scene that encompassed music from rare groove to dub to dance." The album featured breakbeats, sampling, and rapping on a number of tracks, but the design of the album differed from traditional hip-hop. Music critic Simon Reynolds stated that the album also marked a change in electronic and dance music, "a shift toward a more interior, meditational sound. The songs on Blue Lines run at 'spliff' tempos – from a mellow, moonwalking 90 beats per minute ... down to a positively torpid 67 bpm."

Reception

In a contemporary review of Blue Lines for NME, Dele Fadele described the album as "the sleekest, deadliest, most urbane, most confounding LP 1991 has yet seen", writing that Massive Attack "put current changes on the dancefloor in perspective and map out blueprints for what must surely come next" and that "after Blue Lines the boundaries separating soul, funk, reggae, house, classical, hip-hop and space-rock will be blurred forever." Select's Andrew Harrison similarly complimented the album's diverse mix of styles and called it "a record to transcend every boundary", while in Melody Maker, Jim Irvin praised it as an album that "one hopes might just bring down forever the wall of snobbery that still exists between dance and all other music." Robert Christgau was more reserved in his praise, giving the album a three-star honourable mention and writing, "from soul ii skank, those postindustrial blues got them down". At the Brit Awards' 1992 ceremony, Blue Lines was nominated for Best British Album.

The album reached number 13 on the UK Albums Chart; sales were limited elsewhere. Blue Lines proved to be popular in the club scene, as well as on college radio stations.