what's interesting about some of the absolute worst stuff from the 90's was that it was informed by the same cultural inputs as the best stuff.
trip hop, down tempo, illbient, etc. were on paper not a million miles away from the nuum, but somehow something went terribly wrong for all of them.
I'm too lazy to read through this whole thread, but (and I know defending trip-hop is hardly the cool thing to do) I don't agree with this. Sure, some (a lot?) of this stuff was terrible, but there were numerous gems along the way. Basically the stuff that was instrumental hip-hop with mad samples could be a lot of fun. IMO, the biggest issue with trip-hop was the editing - a lot of it was simply
too long. Most of these tracks revolved around one or two ideas, so six / seven minute tracks (common on the albums) were just way too much. It's not like these were functional dancefloor tracks - with more judicious editing a lot of this stuff could have been chopped down to 3 or 4 minutes, which would have solved a lot of the core structural problems with trip-hop. Look at the first couple DJ Krush albums - short tracks, great albums. So much of the rest of this genre suffered from decent ideas bloating out way past their ideal end point.
Clearly, it all sounds really dated now, because anything vaguely hip-hop-oriented from before the Long March of the Autotune sounds dated now.
Also, to be honest, trip-hop's bad reputation is at least partly down to James Lavelle committing the greatest of English sins, namely taking himself very seriously.