Trip Hop Essay -- Music Philosophy Papers

Trip Hop Lush soundscapes infused with a rich layering of soulful guitar riffs, jazzy horns and atmospheric strings, interwoven with innovative sampling and grounded by a hip-hop beat, slowed to a brooding moody tempo. Words can barely frame the complexity that is Trip Hop music. It is a genre so startlingly refreshing and innovative that the term Trip Hop itself only came into existence in the mid 90s, in an attempt to describe a musical style that defies all known musical categories. Trip Hop is an obscure offshoot of the umbrella term of electronic music. Trip Hop draws from a kaleidoscope of influence of jazz, hip-hop, dub and drum and bass. The essence of Trip Hop is sampling, the remixing of snippets of music from the recordings of other artistes. As such, Trip Hop has often been accused of being merely a hybrid sample which stitches together imitations other genres, and is undeserving of being termed a musical genre in its own right. Should an art form which employs mimicry be discredi ted, as Plato suggests in Republic X? In the part of book X of The Republic, where he deals with the function of Art in the republic, Plato discusses the imitative quality of Art, the appeal of Art and Poetry, and the effects of Poetry and drama. Written in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, the main thrust of the argument asserts that God is the only one true creator and that all other forms of creativity are but mere imitations of the original idea conceived by God (820). Socrates charges the creative arts for being deceptive and far removed from realityand asserts the argument that creativity opposes logic and reasoning, appealing only to the emotions (828). The dialogue culminates in a call for the banishment of... ... corresponds to what Plato terms as "mimetic art" it surpasses mere plagiarism and elevates sampling to an intellectual art form through the creativity injected by personal interpretation. Works Cited Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. ed. Edith Hamilton and Hunington Cairns. Princeton:Princeton UP, 1961. Segal, Victoria. "On the Road-Portishead" VOX Feb 1998. PNYC. Portishead -Roseland New York. Portishead & Lemon Films Production. VCD, Polygram Video, 1998. Portishead Dummy. Go! Beat, 1994. Tricky Maxinquaye . Island Records, 1995. Borders-San Francisco Feature- An Electronic Music Primer http://www.borderstores.com/stores/57/hm_feature3.html Ink Blot Magazine's Trip Hop Habitat http://www.big-shot.com/inkbot/trip_hop_badger.htm The Breakbeat Primer http://www.plato.nl/e-primer/breakbeat.htm