Way back in 1995, Moby called his first major
label album "Everything is Wrong," and meant it.
He returned to his punkrock roots on the much
maligned "Animal Rights" — for a vegan activist
like Moby, this is about as imperfect a world as
you can get. Lately, he's turned his attention to
oldstyle Southern blues — just about the best
music ever created about overcoming the world's
imperfections.
That doesn't mean he's picked up a dobro and a
harmonica, though since he's responsible for
every instrumental and computerized sound on
Play, I wouldn't be surprised if fingerpicking
were among his many skills. His main instrument,
though, is hightech expensive DJ equipment, and
in the posttechno world, there's nobody better.
The drumsandsynth sound achieves the hypnotism
of jungle, the dynamism of electronica, and the
emotion of — well, not quite the emotion of
Southern blues, but close.
That's where the real Southern blues comes in.
About half the songs are built around samples
from a 1930s anthropological collection compiled
by Alan Lomax, and somehow the technostyle
repetitions of "don't nobody know my troubles but
God" and "I'm gonna find my baby/'fore that sun
goes down" work much better when the beat is
built around them than when they're technostyle
voices for hire. You can't always hear the hiss
of the record in the spooky quiet of Moby's
production, but you can hear that Moby hears what
they're saying — that these aren't just another
sound to him.
His problem is that they can become just another
sound to us. It's hard to think of a better
producer than Moby, or, judging by the series of
essays which appear in "Play"'s album jacket, a
more impassioned radical thinker. But it's also
hard to think of any relation between the beats
on the CD and the thoughts in the CD booklet.
Moby's multiple sides are all on display: on the
front cover he's in midleap, Jesse Ventura
style; on the back he's a shy yuppie dragged out
of bed. (The only real difference is whether he
has his feet on the floor.) On "Animal Rights"
he's a punk, on "Play" he's a humanistic
alternative to the techno mainstream; he's an
icon, an activist, and a rebel against his own
past. He's also a Christian.
Though I'm no advocate of a foolish consistency,
I wonder if he isn't dissatisfied with the
inability to reconcile his various sides. And
though it's moving and gorgeous, I wonder if he
isn't just as unsure if "Play" is a brilliantly
updated and globalized version of the blues or a
smoothsounding depoliticization of some
revolutionary music.
If beats and samples can not only send messages,
but also debate them, the sounds on "Play" fall
somewhere between parliamentary procedure and
ParliamentFunkadelic. Like any great artist,
Moby has many sides; like only the greatest, he's
decided that the best way to express himself is
to let all of them loose and see what happens.
In an imperfect world, Moby is where it's at,
wherever that is.
