In 1997, two years before the release of his best-seller Play, Moby was convinced he would never be able to write a great pop song. Why? Blame his philosophy studies. “I think that compromised my ability to be really successful,” he explains. “I think a lot of great pop songs were written by people whose approach to the world was very one-dimensional, very monolithic. Unfortunately, I tend to see cultural contexts more broadly and I think that limits my ability to write a really great pop song.”
Moby figured his thinking was a little too complex to appeal to the general public. And indeed, at the time, his plan for Play was to sample the work of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who had famously hiked out onto the backroads with his portable studio in the 1940s to record the music of a deeply hidden America – discovering the immortal Muddy Waters along the way. In “cultural context” terms, that’s a pretty broad brush. And yet Moby hit the bulls-eye with his fusion of electronica production and country blues samples, powered by the smash hit Natural Blues, based on the track Trouble So Hard released in 1937 by Alabama singer Vera Hall – who shares the writing credit with Lomax. However, it wasn’t the “cultural context” that attracted him to the recordings, but “the performances”: a capella vocals that immediately caught the ear of a guy who was a born sampler. The unexpected success of the record also allowed him to showcase his ideas, with liner notes offering mini-essays on fundamentalism, the Holocaust, and yes, veganism.
Moby’s activism has its roots in his childhood, raised early on in California as an only child by his mother in a hippie commune. “I was brought up with the idea that if you’re going to speak up, then say things that matter, and if your voice is strong, try to make things better. I grew up with people who loved punk rock, were fascinated by Situationism, and believed that the Powers That Be are almost always corrupt. I’ve been steeped in those ideas from a very young age, and I’ve yet to experience anything that would challenge that premise.”
His mother, a widow, couldn’t always afford to feed him. The young Richard Melville Hall grew up in extreme poverty, as recounted in his memoirs, watering down milk to make it last and wearing clothes from Goodwill. His only luxury: piano and guitar lessons, which would take him from squat to squat in New York City in the early ’80s where, alongside his college studies, he’d join several short-lived punk bands including The Vatican Commandos, who lasted a brief three years. Those precarious experiences led to an interest in electronic music. He spun records at the University of Connecticut campus radio station, which led to DJ work in local clubs and bars. He then started writing songs aimed at the techno/house scene (no clear distinction between them at the time) which was growing by leaps and bounds in Detroit, Chicago and New York. In 1989 he signed his first contract with Instinct Records and released three records in 1990… under three different aliases! There was an acid jazz album as The Brotherhood, an EP under the handle Voodoo Child, including Voodoo Child (Contracted) which would become a hit in Boccaccio Life International, Belgium’s temple of house and new beat. Finally there was his first single as Moby, Mobility, an atmospheric house track laced with percussion. Hidden on the B side was the track that would launch him onto the pop music map: Go, re-released in 1991 and becoming a smash hit with its energetic beat, ethereal vibe and sample from Twin Peaks.
The flip side of fame
Moby was off to the races. In 1993, he toured the U.S. with other rising electronica stars of the era: British group The Prodigy and Canadian DJ Richie Hawtin. And while he blasted out rave tracks onstage, he kept things downtempo in the studio with his debut ambient album (Ambient), released that summer. That apparent musical schizophrenia didn’t turn off major label Elektra (The Cure, The Breeders…), who snapped him up. He released Everything Is Wrong in 1995, driven by a pair of archetypically ’90s electronica singles, Feeling So Real and Hymn, set between trancey synths and haunting female vocals. Although well-received by critics, the album only moved 180,000 copies, which didn’t exactly fire up the label’s marketing department. That would be truer yet two years later when the artist – weary of the minor impact his electronic music had on the media and perhaps aware that he was being turned into a product – released Animal Rights, an album bristling with punk guitar. Although not a complete catastrophe, the timing couldn’t have been worse. While The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers were invading America with their fusion of rock, hip-hop and techno, Moby’s New York punk album was a decade out of date and sold only 100,000 copies, further muddying his public image. It was divorce time with Elektra, as the American artist fled to take refuge in England on Mute Records, Depeche Mode’s label.
In June 1999 he released Play, a more lo-fi album composed at home and sampling Alan Lomax’s field recordings. Initially, it interested nobody – not journalists, radio programmers nor the public, selling a mere 6,000 copies in its first week. Then came The Beach, the film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, firing up momentum by including it on the soundtrack curated by DJ Pete Tong. The film hit theatres in February 2000; by April, Play was cranking out 150,000 in sales per week. It would go on to spend two years on the charts, selling 12 million copies and ranking alongside Oxygène as one of the best-selling electronica albums in history. Incredibly, each of its 18 tracks would be used commercially, in ads or elsewhere.
With his nights getting longer after the death of his mother in 1998, Moby entered a new phase of his life: Super fame, a status that exacerbated his addictions to drugs, booze, status, and the approval of others. He recounts it in the second volume of his autobiography Then It Fell Apart, punctuated by encounters with Trump, Putin, Bowie and by the classic telltale line “Do you know who I am?” Now sufficiently bankable to zig or zag in different directions, Moby dropped 18 in 2002, once again leaning towards rock but less radically than on Animal Rights. And it worked, especially with Extreme Ways, the closing track to the Jason Bourne smash hit film trilogy. As proof of his newfound swag, he organised his own summer Area2 Festival, inviting David Bowie, Busta Rhymes and Carl Cox. During the rest of the decade, he continued to veer between alt-rock (Hotel in 2005) and dance music (Last Night in 2008), cobbling albums together in his New York apartment in-between DJ sets and hits of Ecstasy – his daily breakfast. His record sales started leveling off while his activism and quest for meaning followed suit. “It’s something I’ve always believed in, but there was a time when I forgot it. It's the classic scenario: you got into music because growing up you listened to David Bowie or some other artist who inspired you, and so you start out, you become successful and – suddenly, the record sales flag, they start paying you to be the DJ. And you start thinking too much about your career, and not at all about the power and the beauty of music. And the final hope is that you wake up and refocus on the music and not your career… That happens to a lot of us.”
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