Sitting cross-legged in white socks, jeans and a gray T-shirt, a small cross tattooed on the back of his neck, a glass of fruit juice and wire-rim glasses by his side in the Chicago hotel room, the shaved-headed man might easily fit in at a monastery.
This is Moby — Christian, vegan, techno star — in repose. But in a couple of hours, after recharging from transatlantic jet lag, he’ll be spinning house records before a packed house at a North Side nightclub. And in a few weeks, he’ll be touring with a rock band, supporting a new album, “Play” (V2), that blends half-century-old blues vocals with hip-hop beats.
Disco deejay, punk rocker, headbanger, hip-hop fan, blues and gospel connoisseur–at a time when the record and radio industries are compartmentalizing music to an unprecedented degree, the man born Richard Melville Hall 33 years ago is an artist without category, a traveler between worlds, a misfit. It’s a mind-set ingrained since childhood. As a teenager, he once showed up at his Connecticut high school in a black jumpsuit with red neck scarf, wraparound sunglasses and gold lame go-go boots. He survived the inevitable verbal abuse, confident in his self-defined definition of coolness, comfortable in his eccentricity.
“I’ve gotten old and I’ve finally learned from my past humiliations, but I’ve never disowned any of them, even if I looked like an idiot,” Moby says with a laugh. “Young people come up to me all the time asking about making music, and I tell them only one thing matters: You better like your work, because chances are nobody else will even hear it. If you go into making music with the idea of making yourself happy, you can never fail. It’s when you start worrying about whether you’re going to sell any records that things start to go wrong.”
Moby’s style is a synthesis of his wide-ranging taste in music, from classical to rap, but he’s not interested in showing how ironic or clever he can be with his juxtapositions. Rather, his best music has an emotional beauty that rarely calls attention to itself; “Play” tracks such as “Honey” and “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” are beautiful in their own right, even as they subtly underscore the idea that urban hip-hop is essentially an extension of cotton-field blues hollers and spirituals.
Trained on guitar, keyboards and drums since the age of 10, Moby plays all the instruments on his records, which he produces in his Manhattan loft apartment/studio. From dance singles such as “Go” and “Mobility” to the landmark album “Everything is Wrong” (1995), Moby ranks as one of the decade’s singular artists. In a recent interview, he discussed the rewards and drawbacks of making music that routinely defies category.
Q–In dance music, the deejays who play the records are often more famous than the artists who make them — there’s a cult of anonymity. You’ve always approached it differently, by touring behind your records and presenting yourself as more of a performer and a personality.
A–My background is more traditional in some ways. I played in rock bands since I was a kid. It just made sense that if you made a record to go out and tour, and to do interviews and photo sessions. When I was growing up, if I liked a musician I always felt cheated if I couldn’t find out what they looked like or couldn’t find out more about them as people. My ethos had been formed before I started deejaying in dance music.
Q–That attitude has made you a bit of an outcast in the dance music community though.
A–There are still some people who feel I betrayed the cause. On the extreme edges of any genre there are fundamentalists and purists. But I think it’s getting increasingly difficult to be a purist in the world of electronic music because it’s become so cross-pollinized. Artists such as Prodigy, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers and myself are making increasingly hybrid forms of electronic music. There are still the house purists, drum and bass purists, the techno purists, but I don’t see how they can sustain that because there’s so much good music out there. I don’t see how anyone can say they like only one particular kind of music in this rich, varied world we live in.
Q–You recently parted ways with Elektra, a subsidiary of one of the five multinationals that dominate the record business. How has consolidation, and the high-pressure environment to make quick profits at the major labels, affected your music?
A–All of the debt that has been incurred by the parent companies in buying record companies and entertainment companies has put a huge onus on the people working at labels and the artists on major labels to generate quarterly profits. Which means there is no artist development and the music isn’t allowed to breathe, and what the public gets is lowest common denominator music. That’s why I left Elektra, because the only music they were interested in was stuff that could get played on the radio effortlessly. There’s no room for idiosyncratic artists because you have to fit the mold and radio defines that mold. The corporate mantra is, “Can it be played on radio?” Otherwise don’t bother.
Q–Does MP3 (Internet downloads of music) present a viable alternative to the current model for distributing music, with the record companies, radio stations and record stores acting as middle men?
A–Yes, because I have tons of music that I would like to release. Digital downloading is a fascinating area, and I think it will work itself out once they figure out how to pay the artists. I think there is a lot to be said for the commercialization of music in that music gets sold and the artists get paid for it. A lot of great careers have happened because artists have been able to get paid for it. If you had a situation where music is only made by amateurs and dilettantes, I think music would suffer. MP3 as it presently exists is great for younger, unknown musicians who just want to put music out there, but most of my favorite artists have been people who make their living as musicians.
Q–You incorporated old blues records on “Play,” and some people may accuse you of being a dilettante yourself, of exploiting a culture you know nothing about.
A–It’s quite possible they’re right. But in my defense all I’ll say is that I was responding to this music on a very naive level. The emotional quality of it appealed to me in much the same way that it must have to Alan Lomax, a white guy from New York who went down South to record this music 50 years ago. If he hadn’t done that, nobody outside the South would have ever heard it. And who knows? If a few people get exposed to this music because of my record, that would be a good thing. Because this music is dying. When you listen to contemporary black music, it borrows heavily from soul, jazz, funk, disco, but it doesn’t borrow from the blues. It’s this huge area of African-American music that is just ignored.
Q–What fascinates me is the way you connect those old blues records to hip-hop, how naturally those voices seem to fit with the street beats of today.
A–And I didn’t have to change the tempo of the vocals I sampled at all. They were already at hip-hop tempo. I bought my first hip-hop record in 1982: “The Message” (by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five). And I’ve liked hip-hop ever since, except for a period around 1990 when gangsta rap arose and it got too hard, too macho, too misogynistic and homophobic and racist for my taste. Now I think it’s an exciting time for hip-hop again, where the music is really eclectic and sensual.
Q–“Play” contains a lot of different styles of music, but the thread that runs through this record is a kind of melancholy beauty.
A–I respond to aggressive and rhythmic music, but what I respond to most is melody in music, and there’s not enough of it in the world. I like poignant, beautiful sadness, as opposed to grinding, depressing sadness. Rarely do I get caught up emotionally in a song I hear on the radio, but there are exceptions like Madonna’s “Substitute for Love,” or Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Philadelphia.” Those are powerful, emotional, melodic, beautiful songs, and that’s what I was going for with this record. You can’t go wrong with George Gerswhin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It’s a weird piece of music, so discordant — it reminds me of something by DeBussy or Ravel in that you don’t know what the melody is doing, it’s neither major nor minor, it’s not happy or sad, it’s just compelling and odd.
