Moby’s coming through town in early October, taking a night off from touring on his new album to provide a dj set at the Beaumont.
Yep, the Beaumont. For $22 a ticket.
Remember Moby?
No, not that Moby. Not the one that did “We are all full of Stars”. Nope, not the guy who did Play and then recycled the same samples over again to produce 18. Not even the guy who infamously covered “That’s When I Reached for my Revolver”.
Nope, none of that.
I mean the Moby that peaked on Everything is Wrong.
The Moby that not only did “Go”, “All that I need is to be Loved”, and “Thousand”, but what I feel to be one of the most under-rated albums of the 90’s, Ambient. Just go put on “House of Blue Tea Leaves” and tell me it’s the same guy who has recently become the poster boy for re-re-re-re-re-releasing multiple variations of the same single with each five positions it moves up on the charts?
The guy who managed to pour more soul into “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” than he’s managed to summon in total in the 15 years since?
Now granted, this is a dj set from the guy, not a performance of his own material. The problem is this: I can’t say I’ve trusted his taste in his own output in fifteen years, why should I believe he’d have any better luck with other people’s work?
While contemporaries like the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy could be accused of staying well within defined limits of particular (sub)genres in order to boost name recognition and therefore sales, I’m not sure any act has approached the level of losing the plot in the name of commercial success that Moby has, especially here in the States. I’m not sure Keoki ever even opened the book in the first place and only Josh Wink comes to mind after the “How’s Your Evening So Far”/”Superfreak” fiascos - neither of which resonated much further than the dancefloor in the first place.
I willingly gave him a pass on Play - I’ve even got it on double vinyl, picked up cheap when Good Times on Broadway was closing down . He was more or less capitalizing on the Lomax field recordings at the time, placing the ethno-emotionality inherent in these sounds over a bed of milquetoast electronica as that marketing campaign was quickly realizing its descendence into permanent joke status.
But after the umpteenth countless re-whoring of the singles for that album, the guy released 18, which, in many places uses essentially identical samples as Play! I’m not talking an Apache break here or there, I’m talking about specific vocal passages from the field recordings he was given so much praise for using on the previous release!
After that, I’d had enough, effective immediately and retroactively. There’s nothing wrong with moving on, experimenting with different styles, but what worked for Moby on Play has become a blueprint for his output over the past decade in the same way subdivisions are designed for the miles and miles of fields around this city - with very little attention to innovation or experimentation, with an eye first towards saleability to a public uninformed and too afraid of to dare look any further than the convenience and comfort of the safe and known.
Granted, Moby got stuck as the media-annointed posterboy for the suburban electronica campaign of the late 90’s. Old school enough and with enough amassed street credit due to his early releases to not be questioned by many of the elder statemen who were themselves looking for similar success, controversial in his outspoken political views, and a look that hadn’t changed in a decade surely made him the ideal Manchurian candidate for the AMP-canceling hacks at MTV to glom on to.
While it could be argued that Moby remains a figure on the American electronic music scene who still commands respect, I’m not sure he still warrants the attention. Granted, he is surely among the handful of artists most American ravers can point to as a gateway into the culture, but how much encouragement has his music provided over the past 15 years to look any deeper than fashion or drugs, regardless of how poignant the co-opt’ed backstories of slave voices he’s ultimately ridden to success might be? Indeed, the culture was more sabotaged by this influx than anything else.
Moby’s appearance in a couple of weeks is about as exciting to me as it was in 1999, when he somewhat-headlined SpiritFest on the back of Play, and I was more there at the time for the local DJ tent and Boom Boom Satellites. He was already almost five years and several throw-away singles, eps, and soundtrack collections past Everything is Wrong, and almost a decade beyond those early pieces that were an integral part of developing an American facet to the acid house/breakbeat movement of the UK and Europe.
The emperor was naked even then, and just as the fable foretold, it would become glaringly obvious regardless how willing we were to dismiss it at the time.
Moby was once underground dance music for me, and I thank him for that and respect his contribution. I cannot, in good conscious, continue in that mindset today in much the same way that I cannot respect the used car salesman over the person on the factory line who actually built the thing in the first place.
