‘Teardrop’: Massive Attack’s haunting look into the future
By the time of their lauded 1998 album Mezzanine, Massive Attack had struck a creative crossroads. Wishing to shed the lazy tag of ‘trip-hop’ that had stubbornly pigeonholed a slew of Bristol artists exploring a wider array of stylings the term cared to recognise, Robert Del Naja sought to soak up the post-punk influences from his youth, sampling Wire and Gang of Four and even considering naming the title ‘Damaged Goods’ after the latter’s 1979 cut. While band co-founder Daddy G embraced the darker approach, creative tensions resulted in Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles’ departure shortly after the album’s release.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anybody paying close attention to Massive Attack’s locale and foundations. While involved in the sound system DJ collective The Wild Bunch in the mid-1980s, fellow Bristolian Mark Stewart had left an impression as frontman for The Pop Group, fusing chaotic avant-garde punk with politically charged lyrical attack, marking themselves as one of the key post-punk acts of the era.
Stewart’s subsequent collaborations with Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label opened the door wider, a heady brew of dub, early sampling, and sonic experimentation which would hover all over Massive Attack’s work throughout the 1990s, Stewart gifting The Wild Bunch hip-hop tapes he’d picked up from his New York travels.
Early exposure to musical innovation was a driver for Massive Attack and came to a head when preparing their next album in 1997. Moving away from the ‘urban soul’ of Blue Lines and Protection, Mezzanine’s stormy electronica, confounding sample choices, and unorthodox collaborators birthed their most haunting track, which still stands as the group’s defining moment.
‘Teardrop‘, Mezzanine‘s second single, is the album’s crowning jewel. Its hypnotic drum loop sampled from jazz pianist Les McCann’s ‘Sometimes I Cry’ from his 1972 LP Layers, retaining the cracks and pops of the original vinyl recording, is an essential sonic quality of the track. Each aural blemish floats in tandem with the follicles and organic matter drifting around the womb that envelops the singing baby on Walter Stern’s award-winning video.
The use of a harpsichord too pushes the track to stridently psychedelic heights, a trance-like energy that radiates with ambitious energy pushes the band away from the stylistic trends of the era with aplomb.
Originally intended for Madonna, Del Naja and Daddy G opted for Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser for lead vocals, wishing to harness her uniquely ethereal singing style. Inspired by her relationship with Jeff Buckley, Fraser eerily heard the news of his fatal drowning accident while writing ‘Teardrop’s’ lyrics, telling The Guardian in 2009: “That was so weird…I’d got letters out, and I was thinking about him. That song’s kind of about him – that’s how it feels to me anyway.”
Pursuing a bolder, purer, and deeper excavation of emotional affect and intrepid sonic adventurism that looked to the future and had put the 1990s behind them before the decade was even out, Del Naja summed up their conceptual intuitions succinctly to Vibe when discussing the album’s title: “Mezzanine is that place in between when you’re not sure if it’s yesterday or today”…that little space where it’s quite scary and erotic.”
