Hailing from the town of Bristol, England Massive Attack are part of the Bristol invasion into the early nineties music scene blending electronic, ambient, jazz, hip-hop , soul etc into a new sound called trip-hop. Along with fellow Bristalites Portishead and Tricky, they really revolutionised the sound of England and did as much, if not more (in my opinion a lot more), than the whole BritPop explosion did during the mid-nineties to bring international attention to England’s music once again.

Safe From Harm was the third single from their debut album Blue Lines and is probably not the most well known song, we’ll have to give that to Unfinished Symphony, from what is a truely exceptional album in terms of production, experimentation and courage, yes courage in a sense of bravery to try something new. I’ve alway’s liked Massive Attack, even up to this day so I was somewhat dissappointed when I saw them live at the electric picnic 07 but that was probably more because of the high expectation from me as opposed to the performance of the band itself.

With vocalist Shara Nelson at the helm and 3D providing the ‘hop’ element the song’s beat is heavily, if not totally, sampled from the great jazz Panamanian drummer Billy Cobham’s song Stratus, well the begining of Cobham’s song anyway. The song quickly gets into the rythm with great intent. The song always reminds me of a human’s or animal’s instinct to protect those they love when Nelson sings the line

‘if you hurt what’s mine, I’ll sure as hell retaliate’

and could be extended even further to include inanimate objects that are very important to someone. To me the line totally encapsulates human behaviour in society in general whether they are trying to protect loved ones or trying to surive. The line is almost a Darwinian statement and is repeated a number of times throughout the song. Another line that I like in the song is

‘I was lookin’ back to see if you were lookin back at me To see me lookin back at you’

The line doesn’t necessarily hold any meaning for me but instead it’s the dichotomy betweens 3D’s rapper’s voice and Nelson’s beautiful voice that intrigue’s me and really bring the song to a higher level. Here is the origional video of the song which is itself pretty cool.

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Tags: trip-hop

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Dance / Electro, Hip-Hop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.