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Moby,
Hybrid
Roseland
Theater, 8 NW 6th Ave., 224-2038
9 pm Thursday, Sept. 14
$27.50 advance (Fastixx)
All ages
Moby's
high-school punk band was called the Vatican Commandos.
The Commandos' drummer now plays with the Nields.
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"Play is platinum in 16 different countries, which
is gratifying," Moby says over the phone, quiet yet obviously
excited. "But it's very strange. I mean, I made it in my
bedroom."
So how did he get there--from bedroom to Big Time? How
did this short, balding kid from Connecticut become such
a huge superstar?
Let's go back in time, to the first time I heard this overlooked
dude from my high school was about to go nova.
Scene: Shoebox-small and sticker-smothered record store
in a Northeast suburb, very early '90s. A spastically attractive
young woman skips in, gleefully clutching the newest issue
of Rolling Stone; she flops it down on the counter,
folds open the back page and exclaims, "Look, my friend
Rich is on the charts!" Her finger stabs at a one-line listing
in the Dance column. Song: "Go." Artist: Moby.
So it began.
In the wake of that early rave success, the man christened
Richard Melville Hall went on to storm global markets, sell
millions of records, and score gobs of critical acclaim.
In 1999, Moby released Play, an album that grafted
gospel and blues samples onto a supple skin of flowing synthesizers,
fragile hip-hop rhythms and melodramatic piano trills. Writers
practically fainted in their rush to praise it. In Britain,
it outsold every other record last year.
In America, of course, you've probably heard of him, too.
Yet while he's a cover boy in London, here we're more often
greeted by the face of...Fred Durst?
Moby, a happily opinionated bastard, isn't afraid to shed
light on the sitch.
"Just take a look at the album charts in America," he says.
"My goodness, it seems to have a successful record in the
States you have to be a brain-dead misogynist or a cliched
country artist or a worthless pop star who appeals to 12-year-olds....
All this rock music that is so popular in the States--the
rest of the world, no one cares. These bands that are almost
institutions here, like Limp Bizkit and Korn and what have
you, in the rest of the world no one even knows who they
are.... Like, music in America, it seems like it's all aggressive
and it's all angry. It just sort of begs the question: Why
do people feel justified in being so angry?"
One could ask Moby the same question. He not only grew
up playing in punk bands, but the 1997 Animal Rights
album eschewed his trademark hallelujah dance trax and heavy-hearted
ambient work in favor of growling thrash guitars and barked
vocals. It also earned him his worst reviews ever, causing
some to question why they'd placed him on such an elevated
pedestal.
Play, however, was not only a return to expected
form, it congealed his previously disparate styles into
a cohesive whole--making him a prime candidate for the Man
to Save Electronica from Soullessness. Again.
But, he warns, don't fit him for that stylistic straitjacket
just yet.
"When I was making this record, I never thought to myself,
'Let's see how can I bring electronic music to more people,'"
he says. "I really have no allegiance to electronic music.
My allegiance is to the emotional, and the ability of music
to convey emotions. I don't care whether it's electronic
music or punk rock or jazz or disco or classical. My allegiance
can't be to one genre, it has to be to the function of music."
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