Moby

Critisizing an artist's output because of the people who listen to him, and because of the way it's used in ads: C or D?

http://store6.yimg.com/I/wwfbackissues_1769_17637345

Moby's may have been criticized pre-"Play", but nowadays he's suffering from the "because ordinary, middle-class people by his records, they must be shite" syndrome, which has nothing to do with the music itself.

Hate on those more deserving ...like that other shaven-head wonder Aaron Lewis from Staind.

or not enough

i'm a fan. of course i don't think he's the best musician/songwriter out there, but he's good. and can be really good.

stop fuckin envying him for the success of play and move on.
there are at least 70% of other bands that suck way, way worse.

I presume what people hate about Moby is his current consumer demographic: i.e. people (as Rudolf cited) who don't really follow music as feverishly as some people here do (i.e. people in the late 70's who believed the Police were French because of their Franglish album titles), and who've had "Natural Blues" drilled into their heads so often that it feels like a nice, big, comfy sweater of familiarity to them. Also, Moby's cache as a more "modern" artist helps people feel -- however fleetingly -- that they're staying abreast of what may be going on over on that fabled "cutting edge". That Moby hasn't actually trodden on said edge in a number of years is another matter.

Secondly, I think Moby is alternately "hateable" given his outspokenness (sp?) on several hot button topics. While I personally find his insights and convictions to be altogether admirable for the most part, he does come over all Michael Stipe at times, which sort've makes me want to beat him to death with his own shoe.

it is the most over-the-top melodromatic toy at your emotions rave record.

it's totally formula, but it works.

maybe I'm just nostalgic, but that was my concept of dance music in the early 90s.

And it holds up for me.

but I liked play in my college years because it was something I could listen to with my friends who mostly were into frat rock and other kinds of bullshit.

OTM.

Anyone those "spirit of the Native American/African tribe/Aborigines/etc" type albums from the mid-90s?!?! You, know, the ones where you have some bored studio engineer knocking out a new-agey "ambient" type tune with shuffling beat and "exotic" sounding synths, and then plonking on top some badly edited out-of-context samples of the aforementioned Native American/African tribe/Aborigines/etc singing about something, just to make it bit more "spiritual"!!!!! Back then it was generally dismissed as a bit bollox, but along comes Moby with a blues-themed Bontempi versh of it in various parts of "Play", and suddenly people are going on about how great it is!!!!!!!!!!!

I remember flicking around the tellybox channels one day, and came across Moby on tha South Bank Show (!!!!) actually demonstrating how he did it!!!! (ie taking a recording, sampling it, and- this is the clever bit- playing it on tha keyboard in time with the music!!!!) And he was saying that you have to be careful in how you do the tune, because otherwise the sample might be out of tune or in the wrong rhythm!!!!!!!!!! I mean, for flips sake, even Playschool introducing a synthesiser as "a kind of special electronic piano" would be less patronising, but this is one of the UK's most premier art TV shows treating him like he's flipping Wagner because he can sample something and play it back in time over a tune that's so obvious it makes The Stereophonics sound like free-jazz improv!!!!!

Moby wrote some of the best rave tracks of the early nineties.

There was an intensity of emotion that was really impressive at that stage in Moby's career. I think he still tries to bring that emotionalism to his current work but the choices he makes in how to express it are much less interesting than before. Just as he began to believe that rockish attitudes had to be expressed via proper rock, he evidently began to think that emotional music could only be made under strictly circumscribed conditions and stylistic rules. Everything Is Wrong was very much the turning point in that sense - I really liked the relative seriousness of stuff like "When It's Cold I'd Like To Die" but if I'd known what it would lead to perhaps my opinion would have been different.

the Grooverider remix of James Bond Theme
the Push remix of In This World
the T&F vs Moltosugo remix of Sunday
the Hybrid remix of South Side
the Jam & Spoon remix of Go

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDCASS80311061506482218&samples=1&writer=1&sql=A7pz1z84a8yvn

?

"Mercy" is particularly great. And you can even tell from the 30-second sample that "Drop a Beat" is THE cheesiest rave track ever.

I think Moby has gained a permanent spot in my heart for "Go", to be honest.

Pleasantly surprised by his new one - retro influences all over (think 1989 piano house) and built for the charts, but I'm 10 tracks in and I haven't skipped any yet (I should find this way too commercial for my tastes, really, but it's pleasant)

hey 'UHF 2' is great

UHF 3 is better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRu0okDESrM

When is the critical re-assessment due?

attempted in 2005, abandoned because nobody cared.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T-MqG8-Pnw

discovering that moby is awesome was one of the better "musical surprises from the past" for me this year.

Mobility, TIme Signature, Go, Permanent Green.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W89ZMdVsock

but daaaamn mobility especially, really luscious, viscous, deep grooves. hypnotic and ethereal but dense and smokey, it sounds like a warm club on a cold night. That is, for something so dreamy its nicely earthbound. I play it on my lunch break and time slows down.

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

I still listen to Early Underground regularly. The original mix of "Go" is brilliant.

also a fan of the crazy fucked up hyper stuff he did as UHF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-sNWba-Kg
(terrible sound quality but u get the idea)

I feel like mr. hall used to have the hookup on some great club drugs and that was when he made his best music.

peace head is demented

yeah no good youtubes for besame either but its pretty fucking awesome when the keys and pads come in together. the whole thing POPs

http://vyou.com/moby

no thanks

Moby may have become a bona fide pop star when his landmark album 'Play' sold over 10 million copies back in 2000, but when it comes to the music of current chart-toppers like Ke$ha, Rihanna, Britney Spears and the Black Eyed Peas, he just can't relate. In fact, he thinks "music" is the wrong word for what they're putting out.

"It's fun, but I don't think of it as music," he says. "It's manufactured. I appreciate it as pop culture phenomenon and some of the songs I like if I hear them in a shopping mall or something, but it doesn't function as music for me."

Long before 'Play' became an international blockbuster, Moby cut his teeth making progressive house and techno-flavoured dance music in the '90s, with club hits like 'Go' and 'Everytime You Touch Me.' Yet he doesn't feel that the current crop of dancey Billboard bangers contain the emotional resonance of real music.

"Music is something that communicates emotion and integrity in a really interesting, direct way," he says. "And when I listen to the pop music you're describing, it's hyper-produced corporate product. That isn't really even a criticism, but I just think calling it music is a misnomer.

"It's advertising for ringtones."

Says the original ringtone artist! LOL at woeful self misperception

"It's advertising for ringtones."

how very 2005

I generally have a fairly low opinion of Moby but he's found a collaborator in Mylene Farmer who really works well with him. He has writing credits on half her last album and the quality, if not quite up there with her best work, is still extremely high.

I'll always love the uncredited theft of Everloving in Oskar's Mezhdu Mnoi I Toboi too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MY-TlWZF58

I like Moby a lot, especially his rave period, but lol at the idea of his music being any more substantial than Ke$ha

at least some of it blatantly is tho

basically Ke$ha needs to make some instrumental ambient shit

dear god NO

in case you missed that hyperlink, he's making a porno:

http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/62674063.html#ixzz1Y2cWxst0

Oh MobyPaws:

Maybe I'm romanticizing failure, but when it's shared, it can be emancipating and even create solidarity. Young artists in LA can really experiment, and if their efforts fall short, it's not that bad because their rent is relatively cheap and almost everyone else they know is trying new things and failing, too. There's also the exciting, and not unprecedented, prospect of succeeding at a global level. You can make something out of nothing here. Take Katy Perry. She's a perfectly fine singer who one minute was literally couch surfing and the next was a household name selling out 50,000-capacity stadiums. Or Quentin Tarantino, one minute a video clerk, the next minute one of the most successful writer/directors in history. Los Angeles captures that strange, exciting and at times delusional American notion of magical self-invention.

ha, i can't argue w/ him about the weather though. the only reason i live in the northeast is because family is here, fuck this cold, dreary, bleak region otherwise. i'd move to l.a. in a heartbeat if family was there.

is he completely wrong though about l.a. being cheap? afaik basically all of california is absurdly expensive, not much different from NYC

also i find moby somehow endearing, i don't listen of his music except "everything is wrong" but he doesn't bother me in any way

When friends from New York ask me why I moved here, I say, somewhat elusively, “David Lynch lives here..."

BREAKING: David Lynch to move back to Missoula ASAP

This 4-hour free ambient album is nice.

http://www.openculture.com/2016/06/moby-lets-you-download-4-hours-of-ambient-music-to-help-you-sleep.html

i have put that on lots of times since he dropped it on the wire.
its really nice stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl9rKRS6LjI

yeah

not bad!

episode 8 of the return vibes

Pretty bland tbh. Trentemoller does this much better but I'm still glad that he's still trying out new things

i have a lot of time for modern era moby, but this did little for me tbh.
actually i prefer those "choir" albums

I think Moby's early stuff, like his songs on the Cool World soundtrack, are the most quintesssentially "Ravey" records I can think of. They might not epitomize the spirit of the actual rave scene, but they definitely elitomize the sprit of day-glo, warped smiley face rave compilations at Sam Goody. And I mean that in a good way.

Nothing he did after 1995 means anything to me, though, and now he epitomizes the American bug man, which I do not mean in a good way.

i think this is one of the most beautiful ambient songs i've ever heard tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzlWvjv6LQ

gorgeous song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSY5HaXxTgI

In today's mail:

MOBY TO DJ FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE PANDEMIC

As Bruce Levenstein put it, this sounds like a threat.

had no idea who was behind the spectacular "main theme" in heat and as the credits were rolling i saw a soundtrack listing that included u2 & brian eno, joy division, einstürzende neubauten and i was like damn, who could be behind this epic tune, and now i find out it's... MOBY?

well anyway, what is achieved with "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" in Heat is all time

Moby is annoying but he's made many bangers, e.g.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70AyJQBIkak