Tech-smart, self-effacing, and supremely market-savvy, electronica superstar Moby isn't a cog in the machine. He is the machine.
Striding up to a club in New York's East Village, Moby could be mistaken for any of the other 500 fans piling in for tonight's show by rapper Mos Def. Black-frame eyeglasses. Nylon Puma windbreaker. Beat-up blue trainers. He doesn't exactly radiate star power. In fact, you wouldn't even notice the Grammy-nominated musician, except that his unremarkable visage has been a media fixture for the past three years.
Within seconds of Moby's arrival, the concert's harried promoter spots him at the velvet rope and proceeds to make a minor fuss - whisking the techno maestro past security guards, handing over complimentary drink tickets, and thanking him for gracing the Bowery Ballroom with his diminutive presence. Even for the deliberately inconspicuous, celebrity has its privileges.
Inside, some savvy clubgoers recognize the famous fellow in their midst. They're the ones whose lips form a cartoonish circle as they lean toward their dates' ears to observe, "That's MO-by." As old-school hip hop pumps from the DJ's turntables, the object of this attention indulges the approaching fans with as much conversation as the rib-rattling decibel level allows. Moby seems to enjoy these interactions - and why wouldn't he? "It's such a bourgeois conceit to say, 'Poor me, I get to make records that do extremely well, I get to hang out with my friends, and I have to talk to strangers once in a while,'" he says after signing an autograph.
Photos by Danny Clinch
Then, just as he's confessing the truths of stardom, Moby is efficiently elbowed aside by a phalanx of linebacker-sized bodyguards in Bad Boy Records jackets. At the center of the arriving group is Sean Combs - he of the prodigious nicknames and even more prodigious business ventures. Then, as quickly as they materialized, Puffy & Co. disappear into some distant area reserved for Cristal-and-caviar VIPs. Here, meanwhile, stands Moby, out among the hoi polloi, Budweiser in hand. Just the way he likes it.
Thirty-six-year-old Richard Hall, as Moby is legally known, is self-effacing in the most literal sense. Not simply modest, he seems determined to rid himself of identifying characteristics. The shaved pate, the undecorated white walls of his unassuming Little Italy apartment, the stylist-free personal styling. He is - consciously, intentionally - an everyman.
Musically, too, his sound is purposely vague, determinedly indeterminate. By his own account, Moby's music is a patchwork of influences, too diffuse to be likewise influential on other artists. Well crafted but - because of a heavy reliance on borrowed vocals - not especially personal, it's the kind of toe-tapping sonic wallpaper (albeit a high-design Wallpaper* kind of wallpaper) that works as well in restaurants, aerobics classes, and movies as it does in clubs. This artful universality helped sell nearly 10 million copies of Moby's last album, Play. And it will likely drive his new release, 18, to similar heights.
Even those who've never heard of Moby have surely heard him. "On a purely accidental level," he says, "I have managed to develop my name and self into a brand."
On the contrary: It's no accident. Moby is a brand with two carefully crafted elements: The business ventures and the everyman musician who drives them.
Like any proper hitmaker, Moby has incorporated commerce into his creative method. He sells his music to commercials and soundtracks; he sells his likeness - such as it is - to advertisers. Moby's successes on this score have been, in many ways, unprecedented. The dozen and a half songs on Play, for instance, have been sold hundreds of times for commercials, movies, and TV shows - a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album was a financial success months before it reached its multi-platinum sales total. Likewise, as coproducer and creative director of the Area Festival, Moby has helped resuscitate the kind of corporate-sponsored, alternative-music mega-tour first embodied by Lollapalooza. And Moby has made obligatory appearances in Gap ads and mass-market spectacles like the Salt Lake City Olympics' closing ceremonies.
Behind this machine, of course, is the music, music that sounds cool - but not too cool. Which is precisely why it's so appealing: To corporate America, Moby offers an easy shorthand for cutting-edge cachet; the man who made electronica (read: edgy, intimidating, next big thing) safe for the mainstream (read: mass exposure, mass audience, massive sales). As a genre, electronica is long on beats and texture, short on verse-chorus structures or even three-chord progressions. But when Moby gave up his first musical love, hardcore punk, in 1989 for the even more obscure subculture of electronica, he didn't just join the world of knob-twiddlers and session divas. He changed it and made it his own. His version looks backward, incorporating melodies, chord progressions, even entire songs into electronica's requisite beats, bass, and atmospherics. He made it music that sounds both underground and accessible at the same time.
But unlike rock, with its outsize stars and stage-show theatrics, electronica is a peculiar breed of music, one that emphasizes anonymity, aliases, and intermediation. Anonymity because the music amalgamates bits and samples from others' work into something (mostly) new. Aliases because when identity happens, it's all about assuming a new one: DJ Shadow, Tricky, Aphex Twin. (Moby is no exception, from his old Voodoo Child alter ego to the tag "Moby" itself.) Intermediation because it's all about using the right machines to find the right sounds - a process that inevitably abstracts the person behind the keyboard. (Moby embraces that process more than anyone: Even when he does sing, his voice lacks identifying characteristics.)
Moby became one of the few name-brand stars in that rarefied world thanks largely to his underground 1992 hit, "Go." With 1999's Play, Moby made the leap to bona fide, recognized celebrity - the first (Fatboy Slim notwithstanding) to make it from techno DJ to superstar.
Moby might prefer his fortune to seem a matter of happenstance, but it's not. Indeed, only by strategically leveraging his ambiguous looks and music has the lone DJ become a diversified corporate concern. For Moby, even casualness is a construct. Read Moby's Web site, www.moby.com, and you'll find a regular guy who, say, gets bitten by stray cats like anyone else. But that same lackadaisical guy is the star who talks openly about the burdens of being the breadwinner for two labels.
Some 50 years ago, urban sociologist William Whyte introduced the term Organization Man to describe the anonymity of corporate existence. Moby's self-effacement calls this state to mind. He's got the same impulse toward isolation, the same reliance on other authority for his work - whether it be Alan Lomax or Gwen Stefani. "Only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile," Whyte wrote of his Man, "a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." The same could be said of Moby.
But Moby's Organization builds on Whyte's; Moby takes Whyte's vocabulary and synthesizes it into a 21st-century, post-capitalist argot. Where Whyte's Man was a cog in the machine, Moby is the machine. Moby is the Organization. He has turned the corporation to suit his own particular taste - and is selling it for $13.88 in Wal-Marts nationwide.
And yet somehow, Moby sells himself without selling out. Even as Microsoft and Dharma & Greg were capitalizing on his ear for pop hooks, reviewers were gushing over Play. Shortly after the LP's release, critic Robert Christgau raved about "the Moby album we've been waiting for." He also predicted that while the disc was "some kind of hit in England, here it'll be strictly for aesthetes." Christgau's forecast was a bit off the mark: Not only did Play sell itself to the masses - it could be used to sell pretty much anything else to them, too.
"I thought Play might sell 200,000 copies worldwide," Moby says. "And that was the absolute upper limit." At the time he was recording the disc, that appeared to be the commercial reach of his sound, and it was still enough to make him one of electronica's three or four biggest success stories, alongside the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy. Electronic music was still essentially a fringe sound familiar to clubgoers and hipper-than-thou indie types; it hadn't truly broken out. Television ads were an important exception; the creators - who spent their days on Madison Avenue and their nights at clubs like Vinyl and Centro-Fly - recognized the commercial potential of Moby and his techno peers long before radio programmers did.
That was the masterstroke in marketing Play - the licensing of all 18 of its tracks, from the technofied down-home blues "Honey" to the muted rock anthem "South Side," for use in advertisements, TV programs, and movies. Moby offers a soft-focus view of how this all happened. "That was just, like, taking advantage of an opportunity," he says. "There was no strategy involved. They called us up and said, 'Can we use your song in this commercial?'"
Moby's managers, Marci Weber and Barry Taylor, offer a decidedly different account. Even before the release of Play, with its record-setting run of commercially licensed songs, Weber says the strategy was core to the Organization. In 1996, for instance, they received reports that Moby's atmospheric "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," which sustained the climactic scene in Michael Mann's Heat, had made an enormous impression on the film-music community. So during that year's Slamdance film festival, Weber and Taylor "invited every music supervisor in Hollywood" to a party to increase their client's visibility. "We put on this free show, big dinner, all that." Certainly sounds like a strategic soiree. Indeed, when it came to selling Moby's music to soundtracks, Weber adds, the event "was a breaking point."
With Play, three years later, the managers took the formula and turned the album into an industry. They had seen Moby's first three major-label albums ignored by radio and Play rejected by record company after record company before being picked up by indie newcomer V2. (Moby parted amicably with Elektra after his second effort for the label.) Clearly, the music industry's version of business as usual wasn't working out for him. So, says Taylor, "we made a conscious effort to create a marketing plan that had nothing to do with radio."
Hundreds of phone calls and faxes later, all but one of the songs on Play had been "exploited," as music-publishing vernacular puts it. "Porcelain" tinkled away for Bailey's Irish Cream and Nordstrom; "Find My Baby" was hooking hipster consumers for American Express.
On April 20, 2000, almost 11 months after the album's release, the producers of a British television program faxed a request to use the one album track that hadn't been licensed. No one had actually expected "7," a brief, unremarkable bit of incidental music, to be bought. When the fax arrived, says Taylor, "we celebrated."
Taylor isn't, of course, expecting sheer momentum and goodwill to get the job done with 18. As a V2 promotion executive hovers in Moby's managers' offices, the air is thick with the vocabulary of modern marketing: Cool Kids. Adult Triple-A Types. Underground Tastemakers. It was Play's eager reception from all these demographic groups that made it such a hit, and the business types are intent on getting them to buy again. "There's a percentage of people who bought Play because they heard it at the gym," V2 president Andy Gershon acknowledges. "Part of our job now is reaching out to those people and turning them into Moby fans."
Moby's people say he's become enough of an FM staple that they can rely on several radio formats to get on board for 18. That in turn means that the innovative licensing machinery that propelled Play will be put on hold. "We're not going to call Volkswagen and say, 'OK! We've got the record!'" says Weber.
"We don't have to," adds Taylor. "We can be a little more precious with the licensing." For now, they're not saying what that means, exactly. They haven't ruled out licensing songs, but they're not following the Play playbook either: No advances of 18 went out to soundtrack supervisors. They'll have to wait till May 14 like everyone else.
Little Italy is turning into NoLita on the gentrified block where Moby has lived for the past decade. Wealthy shoppers buy designer spectacles and French bonbons at a boutique called Lunettes et Chocolat. David Bowie lives across the street. But inside Moby's five-story building, there's still the feel of the neighborhood's gritty past. The hallways are battleship-gray concrete, and there's some requisite graffiti - drawn by Moby himself - in the elevator.
It's plausible that Moby hadn't expected to become a star; he certainly doesn't live like one. Though his loft is airy, with high ceilings and several skylights, it's small, probably not much more than 1,000 square feet. The brick walls are painted a shade that calls to mind Ralph Ellison's phrase "optic white" - a hard, unforgiving hue unrelieved by artwork.
The only fully separate room is Moby's recording studio, a fastidiously organized, double-walled space filled with winking LEDs, racks of keyboards, and a pair of Macintosh computers - a G3 and a G4 - on which he composed 18. The G3 runs the dozens of MIDI keyboards, samplers, and drum machines lined up on the studio's custom-built shelving. The new G4 records and manipulates vocals and live instruments (Pro Tools, the Word of the music-production world, is his basic software).
Before he began work on 18, Moby hired friends of friends to scour thrift stores in New York, LA, and London for records he could mine for samples. "Anything," he says of the kinds of music he was looking for. "French. Malaysian. American. I didn't care. I just wanted voices." The hundreds of LPs that poured in are now tucked out of sight in rows of cabinets.
Last spring, as Moby was thumbing through these albums, he began writing and recording songs (when done by computer, he says, the two processes are largely indistinguishable). Unlike some musicians who hesitate after a major blockbuster like Play, Moby dived in. He composed batches of songs, sending discs labeled, numbered, and dated in Magic Marker - "Moby Ideas 2, August 2001," "Moby Demos 3" - to his managers and his A&R rep at V2. Within 10 months, he'd sent a startling 35 discs, comprising more than 140 songs - enough to fill their own shelf in Taylor's office and to prompt thoughts of a triple CD. "Thank goodness everyone - my managers, my friends - said, 'That's the stupidest idea we've ever heard,'" he says.
A few days after his brush with P. Diddy, the apartment's lone occupant is sitting at his brushed-steel laboratory table, tucking into a dinner: brown rice, tempeh, and, for spice, sesame seeds. He's still pondering the Mos Def show, where he was, it turns out, doing research for Area:Two, the multigenre package tour he will produce and headline this summer. The event is a follow-up to last year's Area:One, a tour that included acts like Nelly Furtado, OutKast, and New Order and was sponsored by Ford and Intel, among others. Moby oversaw the tour both as a creative director and a coproducer, along with Taylor, Weber, and concert and radio titan Clear Channel/SFX.
Such propositions have a mixed history. The pioneer, Lollapalooza, ran for seven years before it collapsed in 1997 under high costs and a lack of direction (founder Perry Farrell has announced Lollapalooza's resurrection this summer). Of the other multi-act events that Lollapalooza inspired, as many have gone under (H.O.R.D.E., Lilith Fair, Enit) as have survived (OzzFest, Warped, Family Values). The rule of thumb seems to be that the more eclectic the tour's roster, the poorer its prospects - a red flag for the diverse Area festivals. Still, Moby's not daunted. The 16-stop Area:One grossed about $7.5 million - not enough to break even, but close enough to persuade Clear Channel to sign on for this year's Area:Two.
As for Mos Def, from an artistic standpoint Moby found himself "completely underwhelmed" by the tired funk-metal churned out by his backing band - so much so that he left the club after two songs. But his commercial sense corrects him: The place was sold out, and the young, racially diverse crowd did seem to be enjoying themselves. "It could work for us," he muses.
Moby's all about being less judgmental these days. That Bud he was enjoying at Bowery Ballroom? A few years ago, he wouldn't have touched it - he hadn't done so, as his early press coverage reminded fans repeatedly, since going straightedge at age 15. "For a long time I felt superior to everyone else," he says. "Because I was a vegan, and 'cause I didn't drink, and 'cause I didn't sleep around, and 'cause I listened to dance music. It all made me feel arrogant and superior." Then one day, after a bitter breakup with a girlfriend, Moby found himself consumed with the need to get outside himself temporarily. Soon, he was getting drunk with friends and asking himself, "Why was I so judgmental for such a long time?" The uncomfortable conclusion lingered long after the cosmopolitans had worn off. "I was just being an uptight prick," he says, sounding like a member of Uptight Pricks Anonymous. "I didn't spend every waking minute being an uptight, judgmental prick - but I definitely had those tendencies."
Such hardheadedness had artistic implications, too. When he first embraced electronic music, he says, he did so to be contrary - to punk rockers, trappings like drum machines, synthesizers, and dance beats were still tainted by the "disco sucks" stigma of the 1970s. "Ninety percent of me just loved the music," he clarifies. "But then the fact that I could also piss people off with it, that was satisfying, too."
By 1994, the mainstream music biz had taken an interest in electronica, and the hunt was on for the genre's Nirvana. Moby was the most likely candidate, and he signed with Elektra Records.
Looking back, Moby calls his first album for Elektra, Everything Is Wrong, "beautiful but confrontational." While the disc featured some of the elements that would make Play such a hit - recognizable, accessible song structures and catchy sampled vocals - it had a sterile, too-pure slickness. For his second big-league effort, Animal Rights, Moby gave up almost entirely on electronic music, opting instead for hard rock - a commercial, critical, and artistic failure that left fans feeling abandoned and newcomers indifferent. "I wanted to make a really difficult record," he says now. "I got it out of my system."
With Play, Moby says, he was finally making the album he really wanted to do. He almost talked himself out of including the wildly catchy "Honey," which would become the first hit from the record. "It was such an obvious idea," he says of the song, which grafts a sampled blues refrain over an insistent 4/4 house beat. But "Honey" was the right song for the times - just techno enough to get clubgoers' feet moving; just catchy and approachable enough to wend its way to number one on the UK charts.
In the US, Play's success grew slowly by word of mouth and a gradual, wary acceptance on commercial radio, moving from a club album to a hipster favorite to an MTV and Top 40 staple, ultimately staying in the Top 100 for 14 months. Finally, electronica had its Nevermind.
Which creates significant anticipation for 18. It will be, for millions of listeners, Moby's second album, not his twelfth. That worries executives at the artist's two labels, V2 and Mute. They don't want familiar production techniques that would make him seem like he was stagnating - or, worse, rehashing a formula. "It was a serious issue," Moby admits. "We had arguments. They didn't want me to have any songs with sampled vocals on them. They were like, 'If you make a Play 2, people are gonna criticize you.'"
There's no getting around it: 18 sounds, almost track for track, like Play. It even has the sampled gospel vocals - though in place of the earlier disc's rusticated "Ooh, Lawdys," 18 features more urbane, sexy-sounding shout-outs to the Almighty. Moby insists the echoes are essentially coincidence. "I want to make a good record," he says. "And if it means it has songs similar to things on Play, fine." It is a good record - and if Play hadn't existed, it would be a great record.
But if 18 is artistically safe, that may be because there's a lot more riding on it. Thanks to Play's success, Moby is now a far bigger moneymaker than any other artist on V2, his US label, or on Mute, which handles his distribution in the rest of the world. Ditto his managers' firm. That effectively makes him responsible for the dozens of people who work at all three companies. "I never aspired to be an industry," he says. "Sometimes I'll become aware of that, the weight of it - and I'm just one guy."
Is Organization Moby a model for other superstar musicians? Probably not. Few have an opportunity to ride a wave into the mainstream the way Moby has. Not to mention that the club of multi-platinum artists simply isn't that big, and the selling process turns most of them into bland multi-mediated concerns ('N Sync now offers its own brand of prepaid phone cards). If Moby's success is a textbook example of self-creation and positioning, it's not the same sort of self-incorporation as, say, Madonna, whose transitions always offer a different image of her - from slut to vamp to cowgirl. Even Moby's de rigueur turn as celebrity restaurateur has a self-deprecatory quality: Opening soon on Manhattan's Lower East Side will be his own cozy hot-drinks joint called TeaNY. Pronounced teeny, the place has modest ambitions, Moby says - "just lovely" food in "the cutest little space."
In this and other ways, Moby is doing the superstar thing on his own terms. "This might seem strange, because not many musicians say this, but I'd rather make a record that's rewarding than challenging," Moby says. "People love their favorite records. And I aspire to make a record someone might be able to love in that way," he says. "I like the idea of playing concerts people actually come to. That's about it."
Like so much with Moby, there's more to it than that. It's not so easy to sell club music on an arena-rock scale. But for Moby, everyman and superstar, it's just another day at the office.
THE MUSIC ISSUE
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Songs in the Key of F12
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Six Machines That Changed The Music World
