How Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ forged a new frontier for Black British music

However, Tricky’s artistic spirit was never static. Even as ‘Maxinquaye’ was being lauded as a genre-defining album, he was restless, already refuting the labels and structures that tried to soften him. In the aforementioned ’96 The Face interview, just before the release of ‘Nearly God’, Tricky’s disdain for the music industry’s limitations was clear: “[BBC] Radio 1 won’t play me because they think my stuff is too dark and slow and moody. That creates a temptation to compromise. Everyone’s pretending, trying to project images. You’ve got a lot of people from art college singing about things they’ve never experienced. I like to keep my music real.”

By this point, Tricky had already mentally moved on from the LP’s success, shifting towards more experimental territory. “You’ve said before you have to fuck things up,” The Face journalist Andrew Smith asked. “Is this [‘Nearly God’] album the big fuck-off?” Tricky’s response? “Yeah, yeah. It’s me running away, really,” he added. “I’m like a naughty kid, always running away.” This constant push for reinvention and refusal to be defined by any one moment or sound encapsulates Tricky’s then, and ever-present modest masterminding over pop music.

Despite Tricky’s psyche splintering away from ‘Maxinquaye’, selections from the album went on to appear in countless TV shows and movies like Daria, The Blacklist, and Skins — further embedding the album’s sound in the popular consciousness. Despite the gauntlet of sounds featured across the album, Tricky’s disavowal of genre constraints and his blending of spoken word-flavoured hip-hop, rock, and electronica gave birth to a new pillar in trip-hop’s chronology. Ironically, Tricky’s relationship with the genre he helped pioneer has grown complex. Trip-hop as a genre is somewhat challenging to define. Or, in Tricky’s case, acknowledge. In a 2023 interview with NME, he rejected the label of trip-hop, calling it “corny” and “fucking stupid”. “What’s annoying about it is, why do people need labels?” Tricky told Billboard in a 2020 interview. “You can’t think further than a label? People say the words ‘trip-hop’ like they’ve been told to say it, so it sounds like a sheep to me. It’s saying to me that you don’t know f–k all about music.”