May 28, 2018 The Nation. 31
LETTING TOO MUCH IN
Moby’s ravenous pursuit of authenticity
by BIJAN STEPHEN
ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP BURKEI
t’s never been easy to make something
new. Inspiration strikes; insight occurs;
shit happens. The American electronic
musician Richard Melville Hall, better
known by the stage name Moby—yes,
he’s related to Herman Melville—has al-
ways seemed a good example of that par-
ticular creative struggle. He’s spent the past
three decades toiling away in the studio,
making sure the conditions are right to
bottle lightning in a Leyden jar, but it
hasn’t always paid off. More than anything,
the creative process operates at the level of
faith and ritual, as a kind of prayer: Some-
times the void hears and answers, but more
often the artist is left alone with his or her
thoughts.
Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing
Hurt, Moby’s 15th studio album, sounds
like the product of hours spent in fruitless
supplication. It’s obvious that he took his
time with the album, but musically, it feels
teleported directly from 1999, the year that
Moby’s breakthrough, Play, was released.
That record, Moby’s fifth, came after a
string of buzzy triumphs (Moby, 1992;
Everything Is Wrong, 1995) and fan-base-
alienating flops (1996’s Animal Rights).
Play would become Moby’s calling card,
the work that cemented his status as the
savior of American electronic music; it
was also one of the first albums ever to
be licensed in its entirety, with its songs
appearing in commercials, TV shows, and
films. It turned Moby into an overnight
pop sensation.
What drew listeners to Play was its
amalgamation of sounds and styles that
encapsulated trip-hop, which at the time
was ascendant. Built around a series of field
hollers sampled from an Alan Lomax box
set, Sounds of the South, the album featured
Moby’s moody electronic noodling over
brooding beats. The result was textured,
stuccoed, more architectural than sculp-
tural. This approach worked on “Porce-
lain,” which could be heard in cocktail bars
around the world and didn’t suffer from
extensive sampling, but not so much on
other cuts from the album. On “Honey,”
a single that samples the singer Bessie
Jones’s “Sometimes,” it feels like Jones’s
art is carrying Moby’s; the juxtaposition is
productive and not quite appropriative, but
Moby’s electronic production is constantly
fading into the background. The sameBijan Stephen is a music critic for The Nation.
His work has also appeared in The New Yorker,
The New Republic, Esquire, Wired, and
elsewhere.