 Along with Blue Lines, Maxinquaye was hailed by journalists as the pivotal release in what they were calling "trip hop" music; Jon Pareles, the chief critic at The New York Times, called it the genre's "first album-length masterpiece". Tricky disliked the term, saying "I was supposed to have invented trip hop, and I will fucking deny having anything to do with it". In a retrospective review for Stylus Magazine, Hebert argued that "there's too much here to be sequestered to any genre, let alone that one ... Calling Tricky 'trip-hop' is a bit like calling Prince 'pop'. It's partially accurate, but the music is so much better than that." Jason Draper from Record Collector dubbed it "the British postmodern album of the 90s", and AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it remained "a bracing sonic adventure that gains richness and resonance with each listen" because of the songs' imaginative structures and exceptional use of "noise and experimental music". In The Village Voice, Christgau believed its significance lied in an aesthetic of cool derived from the blues and African-American culture, which valued a self-possessed resolve in the face of oppression:
