Salon: "Can Moby Save Pop?"

There are so many things to say about this that I just don't know which one to pick.

Could someone point me to where this can be found, besides this article?

(ans: no. who can stomach their IP-culture news'n'snooze in the wake of the wtc attacks?!? or maybe - like i've held - they've always sucked.)

and the word we're all looking for is "huh?"

Is this just something that journalists learned to say three or four years ago so they could handily write off hip-hop? Perhaps I'm ill- informed, as I don't listen to a whole lot of above-ground hip-hop, but if anything the singles I've heard over the past year or so have demonstrated a serious shift away from "bling-bling cliches." Am I listening to the wrong radio stations, or is it safe to say that the Timbaland/Missy influence, the Outkast influence, the current melding with r&b, and the sort of "One Mic" Nas-style return-to- lyricism have left not too much blinging at the top of the popular hip-hop -- except in the form of fond parody (Ludacris) or gangsta nostalgia (Fabolus, that Trick Daddy single...)

(I mean, I know tuning into any local big-city rap-video showcase will reveal plenty of the old-model bling-bling, but in terms of the direction of the thing overall -- which is what the article is talking about -- it seems to be exactly the opposite.)

Just where did Play place in the Pazz & Jop poll? Or how about Everything Is Wrong? How did Move do in the EP chart? Well, each one placed in the top five.

And I suppose that quoted sentence can be taken to mean that you can't simply not like an artist's first few records and then like something they release later on. You'd be hopping on the bandwagon.

"All music is on a decline (die, teen pop!), people are stupid (you were all so late haaha), etc..."

If I had a nickel for every music journalist who places "those music journalists" and "the hipsters" beneath them in reviews, articles, etc...

Triple non-sequitir: "Yet at the same time, part of the reason electronic music is currently so anemic is because its defining ideas have already been absorbed into the larger culture, finally making it ripe, after more than a decade, for the genre's first true crossover artist."

Almost as bad as saying "Get Stung" at the end of a Hives review: "This album will probably be the soundtrack of the next '18' months."

The idea that pop or rock needs a regularly timed messiah is creepy and barbaric. "Can Moby save pop?" is like asking "Can Jesus Christ save the soul of Rosie O'Donnell?" Do they need saving? Is salvation really the thing they lack?

"bnw--what's so confusing about that first quote you cited? he DID help create those rules, whether it's cool to admit it now or not."

Indeed he did help create those rules, much in the same way that I help create democracy in my country by voting at elections.

people need guidance in this bold new world of computer music and the thrust of the Wired article seemed to be "moby can adopt an everyman persona" like isn't it cool he's so cynical, we can all learn from this guy -- and we can learn -- this level of media manipulation is considered cool, as if moby is the bill gates of music and that that's cool

this big money campaign level moby IPO deserves civil disobedience -- warn your friends who don't know -- "anonymous bald nerd" does not equal "boy from next door helps you with key to the future"

great line for sure...but, uh, why, because he didn't invent a subgenre? he was making tracks a hell of a lot earlier than many of the folks you (and I) venerate, and those tracks were quite influential. the impact of his early work was once overestimated because of his high public profile, and now it's underestimated because of the Simon Reynolds book, which takes the very British POV that his only worthwhile moment was "Go." I think it's somewhere in the middle.

bnw: in America--which I think is the nut of the disagreement here-- he was VERY critical pre-'93 or so, a major catalyst in the scene here as DJ, producer and here's-how-you-guys-in-Bumfuck-Iowa-go-about- throwing-a-rave person. I think the tendency is to dismiss him completely because of his current celebrity, the perceived naffness of his post-Move work (which I'm on record as disagreeing with, up till 18 anyway), the naked I-wanna-be-a-rock-star ambition he always, always had...but he was caught up in the "scenius" flow of the early U.S. rave period just like a lot of other people. I think those tracks stand up just fine, and I don't think it's a misnomer to state his importance.

Oh hey thanks Dan for reminding me of that statement. Now that I've been directed toward the light, I'm going to sell all my house records and exchange them for a copy of Play. And now that I think of it, all non-Moby techno is just a bunch of repetitive beats with blaring noise on top. To think I've wasted all that time and money!

I don't really see Moby as an innovator per se, but as far as being a consistently good producer of the current zeitgeist he used to be untouchable. His ear for a catchy hook in the pop-dance arena is (IMO) rivalled only by Basement Jaxx, Liam Howlett, early-90s Shamen, Chemical Brothers and Orbital.

Thus it's not choosing Moby that is the sin, but rather even attempting to approach dance from this angle. You don't see people writing about how The Smiths "helped create the rules of rock music", and they were a pretty fucking important band in my opinion. The position becomes even more mentalist and untenable when applied to dance, whose method of creative development has always been so anti-individualisic. And it all comes down to the point made before that Goldberg is terrified of assessing anyone by the quality of their music rather than their alleged importance to the reader's sense of cultural awareness.

Same with rock: there were plenty of bands who had a hand in "inventing" rock, but the basic ground rules were laid down by about 1967--someone like The Smiths comes along far too late to change anything fundamental (though you could argue they did invent their own little flavor, loathsome as it is ;)

(PS I am not arguing that anything that comes along after the ground rules have been laid down is crap)

Basically I'm saying I don't trust whatever the factors are that made it so I know who the hell the Smiths were in the first place as a means for deciding who invented anything.

so this is what you're *basically* saying?

But I'm prepared to cede as long as we both agree about Moby.