Moby Comes Out To Play

IT S NOT often a Grammy nominee saunters into the Hot Press offices in the midst of the controlled explosion that is production weekend. But then, Moby s one of those freaks of nature a pop star who seems interested in what goes on around him rather than employing people to block it out.
On the occasion of our last summit in Juice on George s Street last April, Moby aka Richard Hall a charismatic li l feller with the demeanour of a benign alien dressed as a scrupulously laundered raver shuffled into the restaurant unaccompanied and no-one batted an eyelid. Post-Play, his third album proper, and by far his most successful, little has changed; the guy can still walk the short distance from a Tower Records signing session to HP central without comment.
Inside the office, as the talent submits to a photo session, your reporter chats with press officer Jay, an amicable Yank with a soft spot for Spacemen 3. Jay has heard Moby s disproportionately high Irish sales compare to the Mercury Rev love affair last year, and wonders if the album s success might be due to its core characteristics of beats and roots, elements beloved of Irish punters.
But there s more to it than that Play is hardly a localised phenomenon. This fusion of boomboxes and blues, 303s and 78s, vocal performances lifted from Alan Lomax s Sounds Of The South pumped up by phatbacked pulses, could be the same motherland connection made by whiteboys from Alabama 3 to Beck to Fatboy Slim; Africa via Brixton, Compton or The Bronx.
Not that Moby likes to dwell on such things.
I find it hard to deconstruct cultural evolution in an accurate way, to make generalisations about what contemporary black music is the product of, when there are so many variables and so many strings leading into it, he told me last April, shortly before the record came out. There is obviously a link between a lot of traditional African rhythmic music and traditional African-American music. The funny thing is, on a song like Honey , if I was to play you the original version, 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, but my sampling these vocals from Honey and repeating them is very reflective of the character of the original composition.
If anything, Moby s downplaying Play s cultural implications here. After all, this could be the first electronica artefact excavated from American mythology as well as musicology. In his Spin review last July, Charles Aaron wrote. On Play, Moby . . . faces up to his own history as an implicated white boy. South Side , the album s central image, alludes to the Chicago hood that symbolises the mid-century Great Migration of black families north, but more deeply, to the poignantly impossible dream of escaping the past that s always marked our country s identity.
In other words, here s a mix-tape custom made for trips down real and virtual western superhighways. And like Alabama 3 (or at least, their onstage personae), Moby s a gnostic ghost in the heathen techno machine, a funky monk who figures dancing for an out of body experience, who believes that dance music needs the shamen as well as The Shamen, and reckons certain mantras are for an 808 state of mind.
He s far from the first, mind Steve Reich was making primitive loops of Pentecostal preachers as far back as the mid- 60s, while David Byrne and Brian Eno were using found sounds, cut ups, repetitive beats and apostolic testifiers on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with Byrne subsequently becoming ever more fascinated by the links between chemical ecstasy and spiritual sextasy.
But on a track like Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad , Moby s deep song is also streaked with Blue Lines, going so far as to expose the relationship between Massive s Attack s unfinished symphonies and Miles n Mingus, who sought to formulate a black classical tradition equaling Gershwin or Debussy. By playing technological ventriloquist with voices from the past (Bessie Jones, Vera Hall and Bill Landford) and the future (rappers like Spoonie Gee and Nikki D) Moby s spliced history and post-history, mythopoesy and modernism.
My own criteria for evaluating this record was how I felt about it coming out of my stereo at the end of the day, Moby maintained last year. I mean, I think the purpose of technology is to make music that people like to listen to, rather than making music that highlights the technology. When Afrika Bambaataa made Planet Rock and used the Kraftwerk Trans-Europe Express riff in there, I think he was just doing it because it sounded cool. I don t think that his intention was to do anything post-modern. It was just like, Wow, what a cool way to make the song better .
When Play was released last June, it received a rave response from US pundits including Rolling Stone and Spin, while the Village Voice poll of 400 critics eventually dubbed it the best album of 99. Europe was on a slower fuse, with the dance fraternity perhaps a little suspicious of Moby s ever changing moods. The album briefly charted at number 33 in Britain last June, then disappeared from view. However, as each subsequent single Honey , Run On , Bodyrock attracted more and more airplay, the album became rejuvenated, eventually going gold (100,000 units) in Blighty. A recent Brits nomination for Best International Male Solo Artist further bolstered Mr Hall s profile, as did talking head appearances on everything from MTV to Sky s Sunday morning religious programmes.
But perhaps the most significant commercial factor in the album s longevity, as pointed out by William Shaw in his Independent On Sunday profile a few weeks back, is that Moby s music makes great soundbed ideal source material for radio and TV advertisements, trailers and jingles thus exposing him to audiences who might previously have taken him for a hardcore crank. To date, over 400 licenses have been granted for use of tracks off Play everyone from Renault to Adidas.
Voices of evil in a po-mo nightmare. If you didn t know better, you might think Moby was applying lessons learned from his film-scoring exploits, contriving a music capable of bewitching club-footers, indie kids, blues afficionados and marketing heads. But could he really be that calculating? Check out the following quote, another out-take from last year s encounter:
I have a theory that pop music in the future is just going to be choruses, so songs are just going to be 45 seconds long, he predicted. Radio or MTV will only play like a 45 second highlight of the video or song. It makes a lot of sense, I m surprised they don t do that. I even find that if I m listening to the radio sometimes, if I ve heard a minute and a half of the song, I m ready for something else.
I love writing short pieces of music, he continued. The only movie I ve ever done the whole score for was this experimental murder mystery drug type TV thing called Double Tap, and the reason I did it was because they gave me the freedom to do unconventional film music. Some of the cues for the movie were like, seven seconds long. I love that, cos it forces me to think about music in such a different way.
Warhol s fabled quarter hour shrinking to a minute or less on classic shits radio? McLuhan s media/message shredded to byte-sized cutlets on FM104/98? Who said future shock was passe . . .
But enough cultural studies let s get frivolous. Let s talk about being FAMOUS.

A Short Conversation About Celebrity

PM: Moby darling, you re a star! How does it feel?
Moby: Basically almost every aspect of being a sort of quasi public figure/musician is odd. I do feel this sense of responsibility and obligation if people are going to go out of their way to want me to sign their sleeve or whatever. There s such a long, sordid history of pop musicians taking themselves too seriously and falling into the pitfalls of public figuredom, one of which is arrogance, so I do feel a certain need to perhaps overcompensate in the other direction. And I m sure that s a form of arrogance of its own. I mean, one of the things that I like most about making records and traveling around is being able to interact with people. And the irony is the more successful a record is, the less opportunity you actually have to meet people.
But you do seem determined to maintain an everyday human connection.
I don t see how I couldn t.
You d be surprised. An awful lot of musicians are so cosseted and coddled and fussed over you d swear they were royalty.
I ve never understood what does anyone hope to gain from that? If I ran a record company, I can understand trying to manipulate things in order to maximise sales, but like, me as a sort of quasi public figure/musician, if I was to indulge in that sort of thing, how would that improve the quality of my life? And also, it would be so much unnatural effort. To try and pretend that you and I aren t peers when it s obvious we re roughly the same age, probably from similar socio-economic and cultural backgrounds; it would just seem so artificial to pretend that wasn t the case, y know? And the same thing with the people at the record store. I used to work in a record store. They re my peers. I m not trying to portray myself as a false man of the people, but it s just the truth.
Perhaps it s down to a lot of PR people trying to justify their jobs.
One of my favourite stories about that involves Pearl Jam. This friend of mine made this small, independent, low, low budget movie, and he put some of Pearl Jam s music in it. And he called up someone at the record company and said, I d like to use Pearl Jam s music, and they re like, No waaaay. It ll cost you $100,000 for each song. So he called the managers, and the managers said, No way, oh boy, they re so busy, there s no way they ll let you do it and it ll cost you too much, just forget about it. So then he called the publishing company . . . got the exact same line from all these different people and finally somehow he got in touch with Stone Gossard is he one of the guys from Pearl Jam? and Stone said, Oh sure. You wanna use the music? Fine, no problem. And Stone saw the movie, liked it, and said, Oh, let me write some more music for your movie. For free.
But what about the divas and the prima donnas?
There certainly are a lot of musicians like the Whitney Houstons and Mariah Careys, who looove being surrounded by handlers, and I think they take themselves way too seriously. I mean, I ve never met Whitney Houston so I shouldn t use her as a bad example, but this is just based on friends of mine who are journalists who ve gone through the rigamarole of what you re describing, of going to the most expensive hotel in town, sitting in one room, going to another room, two hours later, you go in with 30 other journalists, she walks in says, Hi, thank you all for coming.
But I mean, obviously I can t judge somebody cos I don t know what their experience is. Maybe if I had sold a billion records worldwide for the last 20 years, maybe I d deal with things differently. But I think a lot of people who maybe come from punk rock or alternative rock backgrounds, success seems kind of like a fluke. But in the course of your time of interviewing people and meeting people, have you met musicians or public figures who take themselves too seriously?
Sure. But it s not just the megastars. Even someone like Beck, who, when you talk to him, seems like a genuine enough bloke, gets surrounded by so many sycophants and suck-ups it doesn t make any sense.
And in his case cos he and I have sort of been friendly acquaintances for a while, we met during Lollopalooza in 1995 he s still a decent, down to earth guy, cos that s what he comes from. Maybe if you grow up in the inner city and you re used to like, crack addicts and prostitutes and people shooting each other, maybe you wanna remove yourself as much as possible from that. Though in my case, the life that I came from was okay. Living in New York or whatever, you have a lot of contact with public figures, and whenever I meet them, they always make me nervous.
Why?
I don t know. I become really self conscious, like I want to say the right things, and I want to strike just the right balance of being attentive but not fawning. But they make me nervous. There are a few exceptions. Like, I met Ewan McGregor in Australia, and he was so . . . well, first of all he was drunk so it made things a lot easier, but he just didn t take himself seriously for a second. He comes backstage and he s hugging everybody and I pull my pants down, he pulls his pants down . . . he was just a regular idiot like myself, y know, a really goofy, wonderful man. And so, because he didn t take himself that seriously, it made it easy for people to relax around him. And I think that s kind of noble. And again, he comes from punk rock.

A Connecticut Yankee In Europa

As the photo session wraps and Moby emerges from the makeshift studio, he mock-hypothsises that the inaccessibility of the Aer Lingus terminal in Heathrow airport constitutes evidence of discrimination against Paddies. He also recalls chiding some English members of his road crew for their fear of coming to terrorist -stricken Dublin. There are no terrorists in Dublin, he scoffed.
Five minutes later, I ve taken Moby to an upstairs office and kneecapped him.
With my tape recorder.
Ow! he says, reasonably enough, as the offending object tumbles from Assistant To The Editor Sheila Convery s desk and bounces off his knee. Talk about assault and batteries . . .
Still, Moby s banter with the roadies (with whom he reputedly participates in the load-out every night) indicates a Yank apparently at ease with the nuances of European culture. As an American abroad, has he sensed any of the much-touted increase in resistance towards US cultural imperialism?
It s a complicated question, he pronounces, after some humming and hawing. I find that there s a strong human tendency to try and reduce issues to their most simple components, and a lot of times when I talk to people about the United States, they want it to be a simple issue. They want to say, Oh, American culture stinks and, Oh, Americans are ignorant and they don t understand irony. And I m like, It s a country of 270 million people. It spans a continent. It s people from every different cultural background on the face of the earth. You can t make generalisations about it. The only generalisation you can make is that it s a multi-faceted, complicated place.
Plus, there s the vampire factor. American imperialism or to be more precise, the pan-global culture-virus we used to call Mid-Atlanticism has to be invited in. We re the ones with the option to boycott Planet Hollywood. And besides for every Ronald McDonald, there s a John Coltrane.
And The Simpsons, adds Moby. I do understand a nation s desire to preserve its cultural heritage, but I also believe in competition and the free market. The reason that there is such a thing as American cultural imperialism is because Americans are pretty good at some things. A movie like Armageddon, that s a pretty impressive technical feat. I m not saying it s a good movie it s a mediocre movie but it s impressive. Like, the European approach for the last four years has been to take state money and subsidise esoteric culturalism. And now all these cultural people are so disappointed because their kids all wanna go watch Armageddon. You have some 15 year old French kid who wants to listen to Dr Dre and watch The Simpsons on TV and the French cultural minister s like, Yes, but we have this six hour special on some obscure . . ..
I m a democrat, he continues, I believe in letting people make their own choices, and I really don t like the idea of culture ministers deciding what people should like, because from my perspective there is no such thing as highbrow or lowbrow culture. A lot of times I think The Simpsons tells me more about the world in which I live than some obscure French six hour long biography on Truffaut. And I love Truffaut!
Okay, fair enough. But as a former young American from a straight-edge background, how does he feel about the prospect of having Tipper Gore for a first lady?
She doesn t really trouble me that much. I know a lot of people take issue with her because of the PMRC (but) that was a long time ago, I think that was 1986 or 87, and I haven t heard a peep out of her since then about that.
I m a big fan of freedom of speech, I think speech and expression and the written word and the spoken word should be free regardless of what the content is. But at the same time I think her idea of labeling records . . . I understand the perspective of a 45-year-old parent with no interest in music, and suddenly their 16-year-old kid is coming home listening to an NWA record which is talking about fucking hos and shooting policemen. I can understand that they would want to be informed, a ratings thing, much as the way movies are rated. That doesn t mean I support it, but I understand their perspective.
But then maybe Tipper Gore has changed. In 1987 when she was espousing the PMRC and rating records, I was a Marxist and a hardcore Christian and an intolerant vegan. Now it s 14 years later and if anything I m sort of a fan of the free market. I still love Christ and the teachings of Christ but I wouldn t call myself a Christian. So I m saying, I ve changed a lot in 14 years and maybe she has too.
At which point, word arrives that Moby s half-dozen personal assistants, publicists, lawyer and accountant have double parked the limo on Trinity St., and are anxious to whisk him away to a jacuzzi-party tended by Puerto Rican dancing girls bearing trays of champagne and septum-rot. He immediately snaps back into asshole mode, dons his shades, quips, Catcha later, babe , begins dialing two mobile phones at the same time and bounds out of the room.
Okay, I m lying. What actually happens is, he attempts to wrangle more interview time for your reporter, makes his apologies, drains his juice (courtesy of Nude) and ambles downstairs.
Who says nice guys finish last?
Play and the single Natural Blues are out now on Mute.
Moby and Public Enemy play Heineken Weekender shows in Cork on June 4th and Galway on the 5th.