Every music genre has its figureheads that immediately pop into everyone’s imagination when a particular style enters their ears. Any shredding guitar solo is quickly compared to Clapton, and every rapper in the new era is compared to the bar set by Kendrick Lamar; when it comes to the unique sub-genre of Trip-hop, Portishead should be one of the first names you think of. In 1994, Portishead released their debut album, Dummy, and just like that, a new bridge was built between the world of Hip-hop and dance music. Not to discredit the fact these two worlds have been joined before, much of Hip-hop’s early ventures relied on B-boying and off-kilter electronic samples. What Portishead did was introduce a psychedelic element to this fusion dance, creating eerie instrumentals to accent Beth Gibbons’s hauntingly stunning vocals, seemingly flipping the music world on its head, and one could argue it never flipped back over.
Portishead consists of Gibbons, multi-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow, and guitarist Adrian Utley. The band released Dummy on August 22, 1994, and the album has become one of the most celebrated albums of all time, receiving the coveted Mercury Music Prize over artists like Oasis and PJ Harvey and recently landing at 67 on Apple Music’s “100 Best Albums” list. Unlike other 90’s releases that have fallen out of favor after an initial celebrated reception, Dummy has survived the test of time. Even with all of music’s modern technology, the techniques employed by Portishead are still mind-boggling. Upon release, Dummy was described as fresh, innovative, and daring; 30 years later, those adjectives have only become more accurate.
To produce an all-encompassing album like Dummy, Portishead needed to rethink just about every step of the recording process. While the art of sampling, popularized by early hip-hop, plays an essential key in the album’s sonic direction, the band wasn’t just sampling records from the past. To achieve the looping effects of their Hip-hop heroes, the band would record sections of a song on vinyl. Those LPs were then scratched and manipulated on a turntable and scratched, and we can thank this technique for intoxicating classics like “Wandering Star.”
More than placing their name into the pop culture stratosphere, Portishead’s debut can be thanked for popularizing the sonic concoction called Trip-hop. Thanks to Dummy and its far-reaching influence, this dark sound that started in Bristol found a home in experimental music fans’ and critics’ hearts. The album was released to a worldwide round of applause, racking up positive reviews from popular British media outlets like NME and Q, while positive feedback from American magazines like Rolling Stone and Los Angeles Times solidified the album’s worldwide appeal.
Dummy is an essential album for many reasons. The trio pieced together music from different decades and genres and melted it into a hazy daze of subtle crooning and neck-breaking drums. The band made intentional and urgent music that is still easy to get lost in, inadvertently or not, creating a wave of artists like DJ Shadow and putting a light on Trip-hop pioneers like Massive Attack, who had only really broken through in the UK at the time.
