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". Writing years later 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." In Mojo, Victoria Segal later called Maxinquaye "an exotic, erotic alien that nobody (not least its creator) has managed to clone". It was also dubbed "the British postmodern album of the 90s" by Jason Draper of Record Collector and "a visionary post-rock statement" by The Philadelphia Inquirers Tom Moon, while AllMusic's senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it remains "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". By the end of the 1990s, Christgau had come to view Maxinquaye as among the decade's most essential albums. In The Village Voice, he wrote that its enduring significance lies in an aesthetic of cool derived from the blues and African-American culture, which valued a self-possessed resolve in the face of oppression: Maxinquaye has frequently appeared on authoritative lists of the greatest albums, including NMEs 2013 list of the 500 greatest albums, which ranked it 202nd best. Uncut named it 156th best on a similar list in 2016. It was ranked high in a Q-published poll determining the 100 greatest British albums, Mojos "100 Modern Classics" and Rolling Stones "Essential Recordings of the 90s", among other lists. The record was also ranked 66th on Pitchforks list of the 100 best albums from the 1990s, with the site's guest writer Rollie Pemberton crediting the record for helping shape "the landscapes of modern electronica and underground hip-hop". Slant Magazine named it the 21st greatest electronic album of the 20th century and wrote that along with Blue Lines and Dummy, it was also "one of the most influential trip-hop albums of the '90s". In 2015, it was placed at number one on Fact magazine's list of the 50 best trip hop albums, with an accompanying essay