Ooh, Lawdy: If the marketing of Play was anything to go by, your Aunty Ethel is as likely to be tapping her toes to Moby's new album, 18, out in the middle of May, as the Cool Kids, Adult Triple-A Types and Underground Tastemakers who usually go for this type of corporate electronica. Play's tracks were licenced, every one of them, to hundreds of adverts, films and TV shows at the turn of the millennium. You couldn't help getting sucked into its peering-over-the-edge, always-pulling-back melodies of hope in a time of paranoia even if you dipped your hobnobs way outside the MTV demographic. Coronation Street capers, the News at Ten, the footie: all punctuated by the vegan environmentalist's lucrative joint ventures with, among others, Galaxy, Thorntons, Rolling Rock, Renault, Nissan. No escape. Moby did the same across Europe, the US, the world. Not surprisingly, the album went top of the pops.
Moby doesn't get quizzed in the May issue of Wired about how his left-of-centre political beliefs mesh, don't mesh with his fondness for the corporate world. The article leaves you feeling that the pro-democracy pose was just a phase:
'"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."' [Wired].
Kinda funny. But it doesn't look too deeply at the internal contradictions of Moby. Which is a pity because Moby, much more than his music, is interesting. His weblog gives an inner insight.
Moby spent today in an airport in Texas thinking about what makes Dick Cheney tick. And, remember, Moby doesn't do drugs:
'it wouldn't surprise me if dick cheney was some sort of zombie who is kept alive with an i.v drip of crude oil. instead of sleeping they just put him in a closet every night and refuel him. and you know that the only reason that the administration is hell bent on getting rid of saddam hussein (who is, of course, a very bad and genocidal man) is because they want some of that sweet, iraqi oil.
'ugh, foreign policy as determined by oil-men. but then perhaps i'm in the wrong state to be saying things like that...i certainly don't want to be lynched in texas just cos i think that the bush administration is a cabal of corrupt oil men who were installed by an even more corrupt cabal of even eviler (is "eviler" a word? well, it is now, ok?) oil men.
'"oil men" has such an appropriate ring to it. i imagine these creatures who instead of having internal organs just have thick, black oil circulating through their systems.
'maybe there should be a new saturday morning cartoon show where the superheroes Captain Wind and Captain Fusion battle the evil villains Oily and Fission.' [Moby].
