Tricky - Ghetto Stars

The coming of rock & roll in the mid Fifties was not merely a musical revolution but a social and generational upheaval of vast and unpredictable scope. It also represented a major reversal in the business of popular music. There were no pre rock & roll counterparts... who parlayed a tiny Memphis label with a staff of one into a company whose artists sold millions of records throughout the world. In record business terms, rock & roll meant that small, formerly specialized labels like Sun, Chess and Specialty were invading the upper reaches of the pop charts, long the exclusive domain of the major corporate record labels and old line Tin Pan Alley music publishing interests.

Concentrating on high volume sales and bland, lowest common denominator pop disposables, the majors were caught napping by an unholy coalition of Southern renegade radio engineers, Philips, Jewish immigrant merchants, the Chess brothers,  black ex swing band musicians and raving hillbilly wild men. These were the marginal Americans who had been recording for specialized audiences since the majors had virtually ceded them that territory at the end of World War II. The ghettonstore front, nickle and dime record operation of 1949-53 suddenly emerged an industry giant in 1955-56, accounting for many and often most of the records at the top of the pop charts.

Source: The 50s: A Decade of Music That Changed the World by Robert Palmer

Tricky - Ghetto Stars

• Released on: Sep 27, 2010
• Genre: Electronic, Rock
• Recorded in: Paris

"Tricky is British musician, considered one of the pillars of trip hop, a musical movement of the 1990s and he notably mixes rock, hip hop, electronic music and soul music."

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