Can Moby Save Pop?

By Michelle Goldberg, Salon. Posted June 7, 2002.

Many of the reasons this is currently Moby's moment have little to do with the music on his new album, "18."

There was a vacancy in the hip new thing department, and Moby, fresh from the sales triumph of "Play," was a decent if awkward fit. The media's newly rapturous embrace of the bald, bespectacled electronic music veteran -- he's recently been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, Spin, Wired and Entertainment Weekly (next to David Bowie) and was profiled on CNN -- suggests just how little else is going on in the mainstream music world.

Teen pop is going into merciful decline, above-ground hip-hop is being smothered by its own bling-bling clichés and the hysterical condemnations of Bill O'Reilly simply aren't enough to convince anyone that there's any oppositional energy left in the short-attention-span theater of rap-rock. The field is wide open.

So now, with nearly every scrap of vitality leached from the dance music scene that Moby helped pioneer, he's getting his quarter-hour of public veneration. It's not that he doesn't deserve it; despite the reflexive dismissal of too-cool dance music purists, Moby is simply better at what he does than the hordes of hipsters working in the same vein. Many of the tracks on "18" are very good. A few are sublime. "At Least We Tried," a heart-splitting ballad of failed love with caressing vocals by Freedom Bremner, is the loveliest song I've heard this year. The advance acclaim for "18" isn't undeserved (at least not entirely), it's just weirdly late, as if journalists had discovered punk in 1984.

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. Electronic beats and loops are now thoroughly integrated into MTV-land, from the Neptunes' dirty rhythms on Britney Spears' "I'm a Slave 4 U" to the high-tech effects by Sly and Robbie and William Orbit on No Doubt's "Rock Steady." In that sense, Moby is less an ambassador for an alien genre than a member of a club whose rules he helped create.

Along with hip-hop, electronic music elevated the producer to artist status. At the same time, as hip-hop and electronic artists collaborated, traded cameos and remixed each other's songs, they broke down rigid models of pop authorship. Pop stars could no longer be divided into bands and soloists. Instead, they floated about, joining together for an album, a song or a moment in a song. The idea that a track like "Harbour," on "18," could be sung by Sinéad O'Connor but credited to Moby is no longer strange. Vocalists on "18" include Angie Stone, MC Lyte and the Shining Light Gospel Choir, but it's clearly a Moby record. (Still, it's not surprising that the relatively weak "We Are All Made of Stars," on which Moby himself sings like a proper pop star, was the first single).

Partly, the attention being lavished on "18" is a response to the media's failure to anticipate the tidal success of Moby's last record, 1999's "Play," which surprised everyone by selling more than 9 million copies. By combining old field recordings of roughly incandescent African-American spirituals with crystalline electronic production, Moby brilliantly updated the house music formula of recycled diva vocals and disco beats.

Beyond that, "Play" radically changed the way music is marketed. As Gerald Marzorati reported in the New York Times, every song on "Play" was licensed to a commercial, TV show or movie at least once. By insinuating itself into the very fabric of the culture rather than blazing forth into the public eye, the music became ubiquitous in a whole new way, as did Moby. He's always been interested in soundtracks. "Go," his first hit, looped music from "Twin Peaks," and he took a crack at the James Bond theme for 1997's "Tomorrow Never Dies." His 1997 record "I Like to Score" was a combination of music he made for films like "Scream" and "The Saint" and soundtrack-derived songs like "Go." Suddenly, with "Play," he'd created what sometimes seemed like the soundtrack to the entire world. As amazing as the repercussions of "Play" were, Moby has said that he's never aspired to do anything new. On "18," he doesn't. Instead, "18" distills the most influential down-tempo electronic music of the '90s into a record as smooth as beach glass. Some songs recall early Massive Attack, while others channel Air and Beth Orton's collaborations with William Orbit. The celestial strings and aquatic pings on the title song are pure Craig Armstrong, while the gospel loops of "In My Heart" and "One of These Mornings" could have been on Moby's own "Play." "18" is an alchemy of soul and new wave, with elements of hip-hop and disco. Conceptually, there's nothing novel here, which is why on the surface Moby's sudden ascendance into the limelight seems random.

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