Gavin B.

My story is similar. I was in a kind of musical limbo when I first heard Blue Lines back in 1991. I had spent decade and half broadcasting and dee jaying reggae music but the roots reggae scene was dying in Jamaica.

Things got even worse in the late 80s. Most of my cherished punk and post punk bands like the Clash, Gang of Four, Essential Logic, and the Slits were over and done with. The Mekons and the Fall struggled along selling almost no records. The New York and Boston scene was dead with all of the great bands like Mission of Burma, the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the New York Dolls all dead and gone. All of the great Mississippi delta and Chicago blues singers were dead. And Elvis Costello, the one musician who made consistent albums throughout the 80s was producing a string of baffling and incoherent albums like Spike and Mighty Like A Rose and the Juliet Letters.

Massive Attack changed everything for me and got me interested in popular music again. Blue Lines was a pastiche of nearly every kind of music I liked including pop music, reggae, dub, hip hop, dee jay style, soul, punk and experimental music. Massive Attack music was innovative, visionary and unprecendented. Massive Attack was ground zero of the current post-rock electronica movement and the most important band of the 90s.

Ivo Watts-Russell's recording group This Mortal Coil was doing a similar thing in the 80s but his approach was a narrower gothic, dream pop form of electronica. Massive Attack was important because they managed to fuse all of those diverse currents to create a new musical beast . They opened my eyes to a new world of musical possibilities by smashing all of the categories and genres and building a whole new kind of musical form.