Everything Is Wrong (1995)

I'd been aware of Moby before Everything Is Wrong, but this third album by him (not counting anthologies and remix projects) was about where I got on board with the larger project—as I recall, it got a lot of warm reviews, and was the shiny object of everyone's attention for a few minutes. It is uneven—Moby seems to have some formal ideas about incorporating electric guitar and punk-rock noise into some of these tracks—something about "authenticity" I think, or maybe it was just that it was still the post-grunge times. They don't work as well. I get the sense Moby decided "punk-rock" meant "ugly as you can make it," which of course is wrong. But not everything here is, by any means. In fact, the high points—"Hymn," "Feeling So Real," "Everytime You Touch Me," and many others, including the exquisitely titled "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" (longest song here, clocking in at 7:22)—are high points of his whole catalog. Everything Is Wrong is not skimpy with them at all. I think these soaring exercises he seems capable of pealing off are just remarkable, reducing me to all kinds of tender emotional submersions. Moby's music absolutely can take one by surprise. It is startling in its beauty, deeply felt and moving, even against one's will, though all he appears to be doing objectively is touching high notes on keyboards, powered by interesting beats. Actually, it's the melodies doing the work, and the gospel sources, tracing dynamics and swells so few even try for, entering spiritual realms of peace and joy. Listen to me. I am often surprised all over again when I play his stuff. Speculation: Eminem hates Moby so much for exactly this reason (if indeed that is anything more than a convenient public stance Eminem has adopted, which is quite possible, though the animus feels real, not least for its persistence). Moby is Gallant to Eminem's Goofus, and everything he touches becomes good and beautiful. No wonder Eminem resents him. I suppose Moby might also seem lame to a red-blooded American character such as Eminem, but hey, Moby is the one with bloodlines back to Herman Melville. In fairness, and as a consumer guide note, the best of Everything Is Wrong is collected (and the least of it eliminated) on the anthology MobySongs 1993-1998, which is probably the wiser use of your money.

MobySongs 1993-1998

As an anthology and de facto best-of that sets out to cover the heights of Moby's career across arguably his best six years, this jilted-label follow-on to the megahit Play always did have the better chance of being the better album, and so it seems to me that it is. It's the one to park in the car player for weeks and months on endless loop, and the one to reach for when house guests with marijuana want to know a little more about this Moby character. It's not set up like most anthologies, proceeding chronologically through a career, but rather jumps about casually within its title-specified time frame. Indeed, the sequencing seems thoroughly meditated because its effect is so nigh perfect—it's one of the few albums I never play on shuffle, even on my computer, where I have the entire planet more or less set to shuffle. I said before that Play had no innovations but in one way at least it's certainly different from the material here: the roots sourcing of old blues and gospel musical figures is far more explicit on Play. Yet I do hear or sense on some level the orientation, or the grasping for it, compressed deeply into the grain of the sound. If he's not very soulful, and I think a good case can be made that he is that exactly, at least it's apparent how much he wants to be. The sounds here can veer close in some moments to the kind of new-age background music that professional massage therapists pack along with their oils and tables, but it never quite evaporates into aural wallpaper and often sails into the room and slows or stops conversation like angels walking over graves. Moby's general intentions are evident even in titles such as "Hymn," "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters," the 10:47 "Alone," "The Rain Falls and the Sky Shudders," and "Grace," which have the ability to soar. But I say his intentions are equally evident in the wukka-wukka neo-blaxploitation soundtrack number "I Like to Score." And my favorites are his classic techno moments, "Go," "Move (You Make Me Feel So Good)," and "Anthem," each assembled and proceeding as deliberately as anything else here, invariably producing an irresistible urge to move and, somehow, an undeniable sense of comfort and well-being at multiple levels. Not sure how he's doing that, but I do keep listening.

Play (1999)

My experience with this was that suddenly, one day in the summer of 1999, it and Moby were widely agreed on as great album and great artist, and the only thing to do was resign oneself and, as the multifaceted title implicitly directed, listen constantly—which I did, and not unhappily either. (I've learned it's usually the best thing to do when inevitable albums come along, cf., Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Rumours, or Murmur, or Odelay) Even Robert Christgau handed out one of his infrequent A+ grades for it. As a matter of commercial and/or marketing enterprise, Play more or less backed into its success, licensing every track, all 18 of them—even "7," the moral equivalent of little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea—for use in movies, television shows, and/or ads for American Express, Bailey's Irish Cream, Maxwell House, Nissan, Nordstrom, Rolling Rock, and Volkswagen. This could well make it literally the greatest sellout of all time. You thought it was inescapable in its time? It was inescapable in its time. Born Richard Melville Hall in Harlem, and raised in Connecticut, Moby is a several-generations-removed nephew of Herman Melville, hence the enduring nickname. And as long as we're inflating terms of comparison with 19th-century referents, let's take a moment to remember the note that Ralph Waldo Emerson sent to Walt Whitman on the publication of the first batch of poems that would become Leaves of Grass when Whitman was already pushing 40: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion." This particular white whale was closer to 35 than 25 when Play came out, with five albums already under his belt (some, such as Everything Is Wrong, very good) along with a ton of studio, production, and soundtrack work. To me, now, Play sounds more like an intensely likeable piece of journeyman work than any kind of breakthrough, iconoclastic or otherwise—it's a consolidation of victories won elsewhere. Its chief pleasures—the insinuating beats, dramatic studio textures, and especially the soaring melodies, much of it shrewdly sourced one way or another to roots gospel music from the '20s and '30s—are not anything particularly new for Moby. He had been working these 40 acres for the better part of the decade. So I liked Play a lot for a year or two, went to see the show on a road trip to Minneapolis and sweated and danced and hollered, and then basically put it away and never took it out again, even as his follow-up releases won my interest fleetingly, but never deeply or for long. If you haven't heard Play, you should. But you probably have and know already exactly how you feel about it.