Much like trip-hop beats (which we've covered here), using bassline loops is a perfectly valid approach, and memorable trip-hop tracks such as Portishead’s Glory Box make great use of quite ...

1. It’s perfectly possible to build a trip-hop beat loop from scratch, but there’s often something about the feel of a sampled or pre-prepared loop that defines the feel of the track.

“Today, trip-hop is the most toothless of beats-based styles,” the critic Jody Rosen wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Times about Massive Attack, one of the genre’s standard-bearers.

Staples, once affiliated with the alternative hip-hop collective Odd Future, is known not just for his music but for a self-aware sense of humor that’s made him a sharp presence on social media.