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Moby’s been called a lot of things since Play sold 10 million
copies on the back of sharp-minded licensing deals that saw all 18 of
its tracks farmed out to commercials, movies and soundtracks. Now he’s
back with 18 more songs to dance, sob and sell to.
by Sean Plummer
Moby is intrigued by Bif Naked.
The New York-based electronic music superstar, in
Toronto this past February to deliver the keynote address at Canadian
Music Week and promote his new album 18, flips through the December-January
Access, with Bif on the cover. He’s never heard of the punky
Vancouver shouter and that interests him.
“When I travel and do promotional tours,”
he says, “you’ll go to certain countries and there will be
artists within that country who are huge, but then outside of the country
no one knows who they are. You go to Germany, and Rammstein in Germany
sells millions of records and can sell out the equivalent of Madison
Square Garden three nights in a row.
“I don’t know why, I just find it so fascinating
because I always, when I was growing up, had this idea that musicians
were successful everywhere. Like the Rolling Stones. Everyone knew who
the Rolling Stones were, and The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. And to have
bands who can be hugely successful one place, then travel 10 minutes
and no one knows who they are...”
Where are you really popular, I ask?
Unabashed, Moby gently points out the obvious. “Well,
the last record went platinum in, I think, 30 different countries so
it’s pretty international.”
Oh, right. I forgot. The last album. That would be
1999’s Play. Made for about US$25,000 in Moby’s bedroom
studio in New York. Sold 10 million copies and generated $150,000,000
for V2 Records. Every song licensed to TV and movies, including The
Beach, Any Given Sunday and Big Daddy. Play,
a critical favourite, becomes omnipresent, and Moby goes from playing
clubs to arenas. He also performs at the Grammies, the Nobel Prize awards,
and, more recently, the closing ceremonies of the winter Olympics in
Salt Lake City. Play’s success also spawns Area: One, last
summer’s profitable dance music tour that included Nelly Furtado,
The Roots, Outkast and Paul Oakenfold. Area: Two is scheduled to take
place later this summer or fall, and will feature David Bowie and Busta
Rhymes, among others.
Like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, Moby is
about as “successful everywhere” as musicians get nowadays.
Richard Melville Hall (Moby is a childhood nickname that references
Moby Dick author and relative Herman Melville) has stepped up
from the dance music underground to become a favourite of both the music
intelligentsia and soccer moms. That transition, never a bloodless one,
sparked its share of criticism, much of it accusing Moby of selling
his soul.
For his part, Moby was proud of Play and wanted
it to be heard — by any means necessary. If that meant ‘Porcelain’
accompanying Leonardo DiCaprio romping on a beach, so be it. That Play
was heard by millions of people, Moby acknowledges, was both gratifying
and freeing. “In some ways I felt less pressure making this record
than I’ve ever felt before. Because everything else I’ve done
up until this point I’ve kind of felt like I had an ax to grind
or had some agenda. And this is the first time where I kind of felt
like ‘okay, it’s not a battle.’
“As far as dealing with the public is concerned,
it’s not a battle. Because with Play, it was a battle just
to get people to listen to the record. With this record I relaxed a
little bit, and the only thing I was trying to do — and this might
sound really banal and simple — I was focusing just on music and
not... feeling like I had to jump up and down to get people’s attention.”
Which is not to say that Moby’s assimilation
into popular culture is complete, a point brought home by NBC’s
treatment of his Olympics performance. “I performed three times...
and NBC in the States, basically, during the first performance, went
to a commercial; during the second performance, showed shots of the
audience; and, during the third performance, interviewed people in the
parking lot. The problem there is whoever was producing the NBC broadcast
was [from] NBC Sports, and people at NBC Sports were like ‘Moby?
What’s Moby?’ They treated me like a bastard stepchild.”
Not exactly healthy for one’s ego. Especially
for Moby, a sufferer of chronic low self-esteem. And while he doesn’t
walk with a stoop or mumble, his self-consciousness becomes evident
in conversation by his frequent use of caveats like “but that’s
just my opinion” and “from my perspective.” So wealth
hasn’t cured him of his self-doubt?
“It’s made it much worse,” he admits.
“It’s funny, after the Olympics I was on this private plane
with KISS and Earth, Wind & Fire. And [KISS bassist] Gene Simmons,
I’d never spoken to him in my life, had never met him. We’re
leaving the plane, he looks at me in all earnestness and says, ‘Moby,
you are a powerful and attractive man.’ That’s all he said.
And I was like, ‘Do you live in my head?’ It was very strange.
“It’s hard to undo the emotional habits
of 36 years,” he reasons. “To make an analogy, imagine you
own a house. You buy this house and there’s tons of things wrong
with it — the windows need replacing, the deck is falling apart,
the kitchen is crappy — and then, all of a sudden, almost by magic,
everything that was wrong with the house is fixed. And you step back,
you look at it, and you’re like, wow, now that everything’s
fixed, you realize that the foundation is sinking.
“In some ways, [success] makes the feeling of
inadequacy all the more glaring because everything you thought you’d
taken care of you’ve taken care of, and you’re stuck thinking
‘what do I have to do now?’”
Not that Moby yearns for a white picket fence and
a little woman waiting at home for him to come off tour. “I almost
feel like, in order for me to make good records, I have to feel bad
about myself,” he says with only a slight trace of resignation.
“If I were feeling self-satisfied and content with myself, I think
I would feel less driven to make emotional music. My low self-esteem,
as unpleasant as it can be, I recognize the utility of it. My favourite
records tend to be striving, emotional, melancholic records, and you
can’t make striving, emotional, melancholic records if you’re
feeling happy and self-satisfied.”
For Moby, his general dissatisfaction with the state
of the world — and himself — is a small price to pay for artistic
ambition. “If someone were to give me the very specific choice
between being happy and making bad records and being unhappy and making
good records, I would choose being unhappy and making good records.
In a heartbeat. Which to me, it almost seems like it’s not even
a choice. Maybe this is my own twisted take on it, but who in their
right mind would choose to be happy and potentially give up the chance
to make interesting art, as opposed to being unhappy and increasing
your chances of making interesting art?
“But I think most people would disagree with
me,” he acknowledges. “Almost all my friends, if you gave
them that choice, if you said ‘would you rather die happy with
no great artistic accomplishments or die unhappy with a few great artistic
accomplishments?’, most would choose ‘happy with no great
artistic accomplishments.’ I, on the other hand, it’s not
even a choice. And I’m not a miserable person. I don’t go
sit in my hotel room and think about jumping out the window. But there’s
always that sense of being unsettled and striving. Never quite content.
“But I think that that’s healthy,”
he reasons. “Conventional happiness — and it’s just my
perspective and I know it’s wrong — conventional happiness
always seemed a little bit...” — he fumbles for the word —
“...weak. It always seemed like a cop-out, and it always seems
in some ways like an inappropriate response to the circumstances of
our existence.”
The anthropological nature of our discussion —
so much more interesting than discussing the album — culminates
with further dissection of another of Moby’s inadequacies, his
voice. “I wish I could sing better,” he says, almost apologetically.
“It’s one of my great regrets. But at the same time, all development
is the product of inadequacy. The reason human beings have such big
brains is because we don’t have fur, we don’t have claws,
we can’t swim well, we can’t float, we don’t have sharp
teeth. If we had any of those things, we wouldn’t have had to develop
cunning.
“The reason I learned to play a lot of different
musical instruments and produce my own records, etcetera, is because
I can’t sing very well. If, when I was 10 years old, [I] realized
I could sing like Bono or David Bowie, I would have given up playing
instruments altogether and I would have just been a singer. That was
my ultimate dream was to just sing — but I can’t. I don’t
have a good enough voice to do that. My voice, I understand its limitations.
It’s technically quite imperfect but it works in certain circumstances.”
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