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 ince his breakthrough 1999 album Play, Herman Melville's progeny has become ubiquitous. Once a punker, then a Monster of electronica, Moby the producer practices sonic osmosis, no surprise for someone who admits both Donna Summer and the Sex Pistols as childhood influences. Through the Area festivals, his Lower East Side store little idiot, his café TeaNY and formidable amounts of licensing, Moby has found a way to be a new kind of impresario. Outspoken in politics, candid about his personal life, Moby represents a new template: The celebrity who walks among us.His new album, Hotel, is eclectic, of course, a collage of anthems and ambient, straight-ahead rock. Before he sets sail on a world tour, we discussed his promiscuity and his politics. — Jerry Weinstein We're in a soundbite culture, from Headline News to iPods. But you compare your new double album to a symphony. In general, so far, digital downloading is fantastic. My biggest issue with digital is people downloading songs as opposed to albums. The idea of an album as a cohesive body of work is dying out. That's sad. With the way downloading is progressing the art of the album will be lost. Hotel is being touted as sample-free but I'm more interested in your vocals on the album. Do you look at your voice as another instrument? For years when I was very young I desperately wanted to be a singer. When I was ten or eleven years old, I started playing guitar and other instruments and I realized that singing wasn't my strength. Through the years I've either worked with other singers or relied on vocal samples, and finally in my relatively old age I sort of admitted to myself that I like my voice. I like it for its shortcomings, which actually, from my perspective, help contribute to the music's vulnerability and emotional quality. Luckily, there's a lot of precedent in popular music for people singing who don't have technical ability. A lot of my favorite singers — like Lou Reed or Joy Division's Ian Curtis — you wouldn't want to do karaoke with them, but they have much more expressive voices than those who are technically perfect. Still, you have to give props to the sonic power of a Shirley Horn or Mary Jo Blige. Yes. I love it when they do a good job with a song. But when three are on stage at the same time trying to outdo each other, it's just as tedious as one of those Monsters of Rock with dueling guitars. You've scored more than a half-dozen films, but you haven't had the same collaboration that Aimee Mann has had with P.T. Anderson in Magnolia or Carter Burwell has had with the Coen Brothers. Are you seeking that kind of symbiotic relationship? If I did, it would have to be with some auteur. I'm perfectly happy staying home and working on my studio on music for myself. I've worked with Michael Mann and Oliver Stone, but in most cases the music is the last thing they work on. I am speaking to Richard Kelly (of Donnie Darko fame). We've been talking about me possibly doing music for his next movie. How about Michel Gondry? To be honest, I hate to say this, but I like his videos more than his films. Even Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I don't want to sound too much the reverse snob, but having spent most of my life kind of being a loser, I find it a little bit offensive when incredibly successful, attractive people are cast. For example, I'm trying to get involved in a biopic about Ian Curtis. Someone involved suggested Jude Law. Now Jude Law's a good actor, I've nothing against him but… Eternal Sunshine had a low-fi indie quality that just seemed forced to me. When incredibly affluent successful people find themselves making movies in the Lower East Side and Williamsburg there's an authenticity problem for me. Much of Hotel is romantic. What are you drawing from? In many ways Hotel is a relationship record. In the last three or four years I've had two serious emotional/romantic relationships and neither one of them worked out. The record is very informed by that feeling of loving someone, respecting them, being attracted to them, but for what ever reason the relationship doesn't work and the sense of longing and wistfulness comes with that. There are some relationships that are not particularly romantic but are just sexual. We've all had them, and I hate to sound like stick in the mud, but I find them unsatisfying. This is kind of a cliché, but once you've had a loving relationship where the sex is very much informed by love and consideration, it's really hard to go back to wanton promiscuity. That's just been my experience. I'm not being a moralist — I don't think that there's anything unethical about promiscuity… When you've been with someone, you really love them, and you have fantastic sex, you're able to fall asleep and wake up and be happy to be next to them, when you find yourself fucking someone you don't care about, it just feels that much worse. You're a vegan, drug-free, politically progressive, a proud Christian. What do you think of this administration's emphasis on abstinence-only programs? How do you reconcile these divergent aspects of yourself? Abstinence is a tricky subject. About sixteen or seventeen years ago I was quite a rigid Christian and I tried being celibate for a while. And I just found it impossible. The sex drive is the reason we're all here. Our ancestors for the last few billion years were driven to procreate. It's not something many of us are able to turn off, nor should we. From a positive side, it makes it impossible to be puritanical. When I was growing up, sex was something I had just heard about. Suddenly, I was seventeen and I actually had sex for the first time, it was still this weird thing I didn't understand. Now kids are growing up and by the time they're seventeen or eighteen they've seen every sexual act imaginable. What are your thoughts on Howard Dean's recent ascension to head the Democratic National Committee? When the Democrats were in power, in the '40s, '50s, '60s, the Republicans were out reinventing themselves. I saw the beginning of that with Clinton. Unfortunately I see the left wing becoming this permanently and depressingly enshrined outsider party — the stepchild party. I actually think that having Howard Dean the head of the DNC is a disastrous choice. The left is so marginalized at this point. Howard Dean and his politics — the way people perceive him is just gonna make mainstream America look at the Democratic party as being this crazy New England party of far-left crackpots. Dean governed Vermont as a moderate. At least he has chutzpah; I've been disappointed by the Democrats' lack of courage. A Southern Baptist Republican who has nothing in commmon with a New England Republican has nothing in common with a get-off-my-land Nevada Republican. Yet they manage to present a unified front. That's where the Left really falls apart. The national agenda is being set by the Republicans, and the Left is just responding to it. I have some friends… we might start our own progressive organization, to say, "Look, left-wing principles are mainstream values." I was talking to some of my fellow hot-head Democrat friends and I don't mean to be crass, but we were lamenting the fact that so many people on the left are such pussies. In the last election — and this drove me fucking insane — no one on the left called Bush a liar. That's when I realized the big difference between Democrats and Republicans: the Republicans deal with the public as the public actually is. The Democrats deal with the public as they want them to be. You have to be a populist to some extent if you want people to appreciate what they want to do. Republicans are masters at being populists. Dems don't want to accommodate idiosyncrasies and whims of the general public. They need to be more manipulative and Machiavellian. I just saw the documentary Unbought and Unbossed on Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for U.S. president. Who has that level of integrity today? What's most depressing is that John Kerry is that person. I can't imagine anyone who qualifies better as a national hero. Unfortunately, he had so many people telling him to compromise. If he was himself, he would've won hands down. He was trying to please all these special interest groups. It's not even the Republicans who crucified him; it's the people on the left who forced him to be something he wasn't. His history in the Senate was something to be proud of. Do you ever think in terms of art as immortality? Absolutely not. We're incapable of even having the slightest understanding of what immortality would be. If we're only alive for sixty or seventy years on a planet that's five billion years old — the concept is beyond us. I like to make work that people can care about, that affects people on a powerful emotional level but if it lasts beyond me, beyond a couple of years, it's not up to me. So many vagaries and factors that determine if something will last beyond six months. Post-tsunami — what's urgent? That's a tricky one. While the response to the tsunami was heartwarming, an outpouring of altruism and concern, my hope is that that same outpouring of concern could be turned toward things that are preventable. That was a natural disaster; there are so many man made disasters — the situations in Darfur and Myanmar. I have a friend, Samantha Powers, who recently wrote America in the Age of Genocide — it's a really remarkable book about the complicity of the West in genocidal regimes. If all of the countries of the West sent peacekeepers to Darfur, genocide could be avoided. It's ironic that the U.S. is leading the cause to try and prevent this genocide while Western European nations are turning away. Touring has made you a global traveler. Have you felt what Edward Saïd referred to as statelessness — not being part of any one culture? To an extent. Yes and no. Certainly there have been times when I have felt a degree of rootlessness. In many ways living in New York is kind of a stateless existence. Most of us who live in New York, we're not really Americans, we're New Yorkers. I've always had that homing-pigeon instinct. Whether you put me in Japan or Germany, I'm gravitationally pulled home. Even if I'm away for two months or six months I feel my heart being pulled back to the place I was born. If I were knocked in the head by a cinder block and were no longer capable of higher cognitive function, I'd probably started walking in the direction of home. Who's the one person you'd like to make music with? Prince. I really don't like his funk music that much, but I really like his big romantic ballads ("The Beautiful Ones," "Purple Rain," "If I Were Your Girlfriend"). I have this musical fantasy of making a slow-dance romantic ballad album with Prince. n°
© 2005 Jerry Weinstein and hooksexup.com. |
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