You've Come A Long Way, Moby

As sleeper stories go, Moby s is superceded only by Pulp. As recently as 12 months ago, the idea that this straight-edge Christian vegan techno yankee crank from Connecticut could possibly ascend to the status of Slane headliner by default (sorry, Bryan) would ve seemed, at the very least, untenable.

Prior to Play, Moby s critical and commercial stock was not at an all-time high. True, he had established himself as one of the more individual and idiosyncratic characters in the sphere of electronica. The Prodigy excepted, this was a genre dominated by stilted droids trapped behind record decks and banks of technology, lost in their own soundworlds. Moby was its first real full-on live performer. The hit single Go (number 10 in Britain, October 1991) and the debut album Everything Is Wrong propelled him to the frontlines of dance culture.
However, only a year after rocking the house at the 1995 Fiile, he was back to playing clubs. Animal Rights, the second album (or rather, second Mute album the Instinct and Trophy labels have put out a grand total of six unofficial releases), was a poorly received return to hardcore dogma which impressed few apart from its maker and a handful of body-pierced punkers killing time between Ministry tours.
His next project, a compilation of film themes entitled I Like To Score, was a diverting enough exercise in damage limitation, but smelled of stopgap. As time passed, Moby seemed an increasingly peripheral figure, occasionally cited in dispatches as a possible candidate for production duties on records by the likes of Hole, Guns N Roses and Madonna.
Then, in Spring 1999, advance copies of Play began circulating and ears started pricking up. This writer interviewed Moby over lunch on a snowy day last April in Juice on Dublin s George s St. We chatted for over an hour, with nobody paying a blind bit of attention. I found him a singularly personable interviewee, more like a young American college professor abroad than some techno God on the plug.
Play garnered mostly rave reviews, briefly charted at number 33 in Britain last June, then disppeared from view. A multi-textural feast of sampled Delta blues, Joy Division mood, Massive classicism, and commercial hip hop beats, I thought it a worthy twin to The Art Of Noise s criminally ignored The Seduction Of Claude Debussy, marked it down as a critics favourite and figured it would sell about 10 copies in Ireland.
Talk about getting it arseways.
In December 1999, Play didn t figure anywhere in the hotpress hacks Top 30 albums of the year poll, but was flying out of the stores. Over the previous months, some inexplicable groundswell had developed and the record did something labels and artists alike only dream about it took on a life of its own.
Sure, a steady stream of killer singles Honey , Run On , Bodyrock kept Moby on fair-to-middling MTV rotation, but really, he got few breaks from the radio or the press.
Strangely enough, it was the corporate sector that proved his saving grace. Tracks like Porcelain and Natural Blues were being used as soundbed for Adidas and Renault ads, radio and TV trailer and jingles. Literally hundreds of licenses had been granted for use of Moby music in the promotion of everything bar cigarettes and weapons of mass destruction. Advertising, the unhippest means of promotion for any rock n roller, had done for Moby what all the self-styled scenesters and tastemakers couldn t. Or wouldn t.
By the time he returned to Dublin to play a brace of Red Box shows last January, Moby was covered in the glory of Brits and Grammys awards, and this country had succumbed to Play-mania. As it stands, the album should pan out as one of the biggest of 2000. And now, in the grand Slane tradition, the little guy in the hoodie seems poised to steal the show right out from under the headliner s nose.
Mind you, when Moby pulls that iconic Jesus Christ pose, and the music accelerates to 1000 bpm at the climax of his Slane set, he should both seize and savour the moment. The inevitable reaction to the overkill the backwash against the incredible wave he s been surfing has already begun, and there s only so much airplay a body can stand.
Where the muse takes him from here back to hardcore perversity or even further into the mainstream nobody can predict. But for now, Moby s the king of the castle.

Prior to Play coming out, there seemed to be a range of stereotypical nonsense thrown at you which was, at best, incorrect and at worst insulting. Is it difficult to rise above what s written about you in the media?
It s strange because there is such a disparity of stereotypes that follow me around. Some people have accused me of being a techno guy, some people of being a crazy Christian, or an environmentalist, or a heavy metal musician. So I never really understand which stereotype to take on board or, indeed, what melange of stereotype people have of me.
Were the essays on the Play sleeve a way to try to overcome those stereotypes?
Writing essays for the CD, you can reach a lot of people. It s not the focus of the record, but it s my adjunct to it. And it s a way of creating a dialogue and expressing what my beliefs are at the time.
Even so, do you think people are just plain confused about you they re not sure what you are so they project their own perception or prejudice?
Oh yes. Some people, luckily, are quite accepting of me, my eclecticism and my idiosyncrasies. On the other hand some people find that quite off-putting. That s one reason why, in Britain and Ireland, the record took quite a while to do well. Most people assumed it was a record they weren t going to like. A lot of people were genuinely surprised to find out that I had made a record they actually liked.
Why do you think they were so resistant to you?
I reckon people were thinking about me noisy punk or techno background. Who knows? I do love the idea that in an area where so much music is created very cynically created specifically to feed a marketplace, or a niche in the marketplace the album is quite organic. It was made by myself in my bedroom, with no huge marketing push and no cute boy or girl band attached to it. It s become successful based more on word of mouth than anything else. Perhaps people from different record companies could learn a lesson from this: that if you make a record that is emotional and inviting, then people are hopefully going to like it.
Is that very different from writing for movies?
My favourite type of film music is stuff that sometimes reinforces what s going on, but it s much more interesting when it creates something new by having a really odd juxtaposition. The only movie I ve ever done the whole score for was this HBO movie called Double Tap, which was this experimental murder mystery drug type thing, and the reason I did it was because they gave me the freedom to do unconventional film music.
You don t like the conventional cinematic score, then?
I don t know why all the film studios in Hollywood don t just get together and make, like, six CDs of orchestral score and use it for all their movies, cos it all sounds exactly the same. I mean, why hire someone to write orchestral score for a movie when they re just gonna write score that sounds like the stuff that s in every other movie over $20 million? There s so much you can do.
Production is kind of limitless right now, so why use an orchestra? I mean, orchestras are good at being orchestras, but they re terrible at being anything else. I liked Vinnie Gallo, his score for Buffalo 66. And the stuff used in the movie Gummo I really liked.
One gets the impression, from Play and your previous records, that you re not into pop music at all, and never have been.
I occasionally like pop music and I occasionally like some cynical pop music, but I don t like the ethos behind it. I love genuine, creative expression. It troubles me when music or art is created for more mercenary or cynical means.
So you weren t tempted when you were head hunted as a producer by the likes of Madonna?
I said no to almost all of those offers. In the last year and a half the only thing I agreed to do was produce a song for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, because they re friends and they live around the corner. They were supposed to put it on the album, but the song edit for them was too conventional, so they put it on as a B-side to one of their singles.
Do you appreciate the irony of the fact that you are now fully a part of the pop music industry by virtue of your crossover success?
Yeah, but one of the lovely ironies about the album s success is that probably the most successful single off the record is Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad . It was never intended to be a single, but it s gone on to become a huge global hit. That was never what we expected and I love being surprised by things like that. It s so left-field. Compare a song like that to Britney Spears or The Backstreet Boys. If you look at the current pop climate, there doesn t seem much room for a song like it. That makes its success all the more great.
You ve said that your chart success seems like a clerical error
I still believe that. At this point, I ve sold millions, and I keep waiting for the phone call where someone says they made a mistake with the decimal point. Part of it is because I can t conceive that people are listening to music I ve made when I m not there. The idea of someone putting on a record I ve made and having an emotional experience with it when I m not there to experience it or observe it That said, I m glad it happened.
What was the genesis of Play?
Like all the records I ve made, it s just me alone in my studio with myself. It was the same with most, if not all, of the others: I sat down and started making music and this was the record I ended up with. I had no agenda other than making a nice record. The use of Alan Lomax field recordings was part of the plan that any sounds I wanted to use had to be acapella, so that I d sample them and write the music around them. The primary criterion was how outside musical influences would effect me emotionally.
Was the juxtaposition of the old with the new a deliberate, conscious thing?
When I was making the record I wasn t really aware of that. I was using the vocals because I loved them, not because I thought of them as being particularly old. The qualities they had included emotion, sonic sensibilities and lyricism. If they d been recorded in 1995, I d still have been attracted to them.
How much of a drain are all the emotions that go into making an album?
I worked on the record for, like, 14 months altogether, and I think whenever you have a task to finish one particular thing, like an architect or a novelist or a musician or a painter with a painting show, you ve defined your life over a year with this one thing, and you never think it s going to be done, and then it s finished. I remember about six months ago being at a friend of mine s house listening to the last Marilyn Manson record, being so envious and depressed that he had a finished record that sounded good. It seemed so far beyond my grasp at the time.
How did you get through that?
When I was working on the record I d wake up every day knowing what I had to do: This song needs work, this song needs wor... And suddenly the record was done, and I felt like a soldier coming back from the war. So I had two or three months in New York with nothing to do, and I couldn t really get too involved in anything there because I knew I was going to be starting promotional trips and then touring and whatever. So I had three months of being in New York kinda bored and depressed. So now, even though my schedule s really hectic and crazy, I m so much happier doing this.
There must be some kind of buzz to finishing the record though?
The satisfaction lasts for a while. And in this case because the response to the record was positive like I sent it to the record company and they all liked it, and then you get response from licensees who like it, and then you go on this promotional trip and you meet some journalists who like it, so it s sort of like satisfaction in stages. Or the opposite of that is finishing a record, being satisfied with it, and then finding out that no-one likes it!
Do you ever tire of talking about specific areas of your life, such as your adherence to veganism and your own personal take on religion?
I get tired of it because as much as I love Christ, and the teachings of Christ, I don t think of myself as a Christian. Essentially my understanding of the world is that it s a very ambiguous place. I don t take myself too seriously. I take my work seriously, but my beliefs are always changing. In some interviews people want me to nail down what my beliefs are at that time, and possibly to make the assumption that my beliefs will always be the same. But my beliefs change. My understanding of the world right now is quite different to what it was last year, and quite different to what it was ten years ago. For some curious reason, I imagine my understanding of the world will be quite different to what my beliefs will be in ten years time. That makes sense, doesn t it?
What informs those changes of belief?
Empiricism, walking around and looking at the world, trying to be open-minded and seeing things for what they are. Thank goodness we live in an extremely complicated world. There are lots of interesting things to look at and lots of interesting ways to perceive things. I never think I m right, I just think I perceive things in a given way specific to circumstance and context.
Do the simple things in life appeal to you as much as the complicated things?
Hhmmm I recognise how inherently limited my ability to understand things is.
What about the simplicity of much roots music, for instance?
The funny thing is, on a song like Honey , it s very repetitive, and if I was to play you the original version, it s also very repetitive. There s a great tradition within a lot of indigenous music of things being extremely repetitive, taking a phrase and singing it over and over again, so these vocals lend themselves perfectly to samplers. That s what samplers are great at doing sampling something and repeating it but my sampling these vocals from Honey is very reflective of the character of the original composition.
Isn t there a danger that the technology comes too much to the fore?
The purpose of technology is to make music that people like to listen to, rather than making music that highlights the technology. Even though I use a lot of contemporary production techniques, in making this record my goal was making something to meet my own criteria for evaluating the music: how I felt about it coming out of my stereo at the end of the day. All I cared about was my emotional response to it when it was finished.
So you d obviously favour emotionalism over complexity...
Yeah. When I first started taking guitar lessons when I was like 10 or 11 years old, I had a virtuoso guitar teacher. He was the sort of guy who would play 20 minute guitar solos and expect people to pay attention to them, so I was sorta brought up in that tradition. He would try and convince me to buy Larry Carlton records, Larry Carlton s this old jazz fusion guitarist the music s almost unlistenable, but it s virtuoso music, and I hated it. Ever since then, my ethic has been musicianship in service of music. Same thing, technology in service of music.
Do you think your perception of life is vastly different to other people s?
Public figure musicians, or actors or politicians the one thing that makes them interesting to talk to is the fact that their experiences are different to most other people. My life is very strange the amount of travelling I do and the things I experience dictate it so. If I had stayed in my home town of Connecticut I would never have experienced them. That doesn t necessarily mean that my perception of things is more valid than anyone else s. It s just different.
Were you always so relaxed on that score?
As I said in one of the essays: My ethical understanding of the world is, anything an individual does to him or herself, that s their business. Ethics only enter the picture for me when an individual s actions affect other people. When I was a young straight-edge punk rocker, I thought smoking and drinking and taking drugs were bad. And then, as I got older, I realised it s just different. Different people choose to live different ways and believe different things, and essentially, if I want people to be tolerant and respectful of my beliefs cos I m weird and idiosyncratic and I demand a lot from my friends and co-workers I have to respect theirs. It s that simple.
You re looked upon as a very enigmatic pop star do artists hide as much as highlight their true selves in their work?
I would think so. There are a lot of aspects to who I am that I don t instil into the work I make. If you are doing personal work, you try to romanticise the character you re presenting. I think I get quite personal that s the music I m attracted to, music with a strong personal element. But there are a lot of things I keep to myself.
But as an artist, is all of your life valid material from which to fashion music?
If I thought personal things would be of some use in songs, or if they could influence a record in a positive way, I d use anything. It s more the idea that I don t think it would make for interesting music. I don t have anything off limits, it s just that some stuff is kinda mundane. A lot of personal fodder that fills us up is just not interesting.
People don t know that much about you, do they?
That s because they don t ask. The fact is I ll share anything. In interviews, I believe I m quite honest, but I m not sure. I m aware of the fact that I m speaking in a public forum, but I don t see any reason to deliberately lie to anyone. I m not clever enough to do that. Being honest is fun.
You have in the past spoken very openly about your relationships with people. Play is such an emotional, personal record that it seems driven as much by relationship heaven as relationship hell. True?
If I was involved in a wholesome, healthy, happy relationship, I wouldn t be as compelled to make music. One of the things that drives my desire to make music is my desire to connect with some thing or someone. If I had that consistently intimate level of connection in my life with someone, I might not need to express my longing in the music I make.
Do you wish that was different?
If I had a choice to make it would be, hands-down, to make records. At least at this point in my life. At some point in the future it might be nice to change the balance. But you know, I really like being single. I have lots of relationships, but not specific, long-term, monogamous relationships.
That s not the sort of statement that sits well with the public perception of you.
People have this idea of me being as an ascetic monk-like Christian, in my cloister, transcribing manuscripts. In general and this is bad graduate student philosophising a lot of the archetypes and paradigms that have been handed down to us are being recognised as quite arbitrary, especially when it comes to romantic involvement, relationships and marriage.
Institutions that made a lot of sense 100 years ago or 500 hundred years ago really don t make a lot of sense to us now. I m not saying that marriage and relationships should be thrown out the window. I just like to redefine things for myself and my circumstances rather than take on things that were forged in circumstances extremely different from the ones I live in.
So is a long term relationship out of the question for Moby?
It s a very romantic idea and I aspire to it, but I m not so sure if it s realistic. Let me ask you this question can anyone ever really experience the absolute concept and reality of marriage unless they ve been divorced? Ireland has a different cultural tradition, but in America a lot of people get married with an underlying idea that they will, at some point in the future, get divorced.
Is that understanding the product of wider social changes?
Well, women especially are empowered in ways that our ancestors could never have dreamed of. In the bad old days, if a woman was 25 and hadn t hitched herself into marriage her life was over. Now, it seems that if a woman is 25 and has hitched herself into marriage her life is over. Most women I know prize their freedom above anything. They love the idea of having a strong romantic partner or a boyfriend, but they don t want their autonomy taken away from them. I think that s wonderful.