thoughts
How I fell in and out of love with Moby
in 17 min.
Today at work, I did what I always do when I’m listening to music. I look up biographical information on the artists. For the time they have my attention on the headphones, I want to know everything about them. What makes them work so hard for music? why did they choose those things to say. What happened in their careers, what mark did they/ have they/ will they make?
Moby makes this easy my having a very content-full website. Which is where my love affair began and ended, www.moby.com. I started looking at tour dates, all around Europe, very nice. No chance of catching a show. Then the bio. Very sweet, like some one who always wanted to succeed for the chance to say, “that’s me, I’m doing it” like most artists who feel like their work has never really begun, moby’s auto-timeline focused on progression, with joyful side notes of success. Something at the end was very sweet, sweet enough to guide me over the journal that starts circa fall 2000 and goes until yesterday, oct 2, 2002. I read about moby’s distaste for george w. bush. Its pre-election anxiousness reminded me of similar moments I shard with friends in the fall, living in Chicago, arguing with the neo-hardcore on the dangerous allure of Ralph Nader. I found myself very much connecting with the passion and desperation revealed in moby’s journal. It definitely helps if you’re listening to his equally passionate ( and desperately analytical) music. so I interrupted my read and decided to write a letter.
Ok that’s sort of weird. Well, I’ve been doing this reading bios and wanting to communicate with musicians thing a lot lately. It definitely has to do with the confines of the cubicle and the easy access to 15 min of spare time at work. I wrote the guy from Codeine, no response, and asked a question of a representative of the Mt. Goats. I even joined a fan club and posted an addition to a web story on the B52’s website. The strangest thing is that a random grab from my cd box means another hour or so of complete devotion to a particular band. Well this time it was only 17 min.
I wrote about 8 lines, talking about my job and how I put it aside to read his website. A little about the company I was updated for dramatic flavor and then on to a bit about the tragedy of generic constraints. When I still gave a shit about what my MA thesis was going to be about I was thinking of genre and history and how all histories of music are obsessed with the genealogical progress of one genre to the next. I was going to say cool stuff about the borderlands of genre and the moments where people miss things because of genre. About that time I wrote a paper about the discipline of genre for my requisite University of Chicago class on Foucault. Its not just that records stores, website, and everyone who has too many cds for alphabetical order organizes music by genre but that genre is critical in understanding and relating to music. thinking of moby as an electronic artists kept me ignorant of his work for years, though his billing as just about anything else would have plopped him in my lap years ago. Just like I never would have listened to pedro the lion if they hadn’t been genre crossing at a sweep the leg johnny show highlighting their genre difference from the bland expanse of late 90’s emo. So I think moby was really cheated but the rise and fall ecstasy teenage rebellion. Yeah sure he got is day in the sun, or rather in the twinkling instability of techno counterculture, but what he real lost was his chance to be important before he was passe.
Too bad moby. But good for me, because I’m reading this journal and loving it. Reading the essays and being totally taken in. I want this, I say to myself. Where is this life he’s leading? I want it, all of it, its foggy lyrics, tender breathy vocals, its sexuality, the pulse and drive of one man’s ego about to shatter. So I was in love with moby. Right there in my cubicle. I started thinking of places where there was access to this apparently real subculture of skinny unbelievably sexy vegans and where I could get one, much less famous of course, for myself.
The romance didn’t last long, sadly. I remembered a contact lync on the website and I consulted it. Moby was going to get my silly email and forget about it, but I would know that I was participating in a communicative effort. Essays, criticism, response, community, communication. It was a lovely progressive place to be. Because not only was this vegan political and sexy but he was opening himself up, communicating to his fans in the most open forum on earth. It was too awesome. But there was a catch. On the contact page this what I found:
http://www.moby.com/info/html/frameContactInfo.html
North American Management
MCT Management
333 West 52nd Street
Suite 1003
New York, NY 10019
Rest Of World
DEF Management
PO BOX 2477
London
NW6 6NQ
UK
in an instant I was out of love. Love
left me leaving a sinking feeling. I
moved my head phones from my ears, till moby became a whisper, an echo. I
clicked back once then twice. I found myself looking at a promo photo from 18
, I clicked again the google site that led me to moby.com. at once a
realization washed over me. like
answering questions before you are really awake, I realized a single word.
Marketing.
My lip puckered and fell out of love with Moby, his veganism, his essays, all of it fell wayside, memory trash out the window. We live in deceptive times, full of moments where authenticity and calculation and verily unclear. Does moby write his heartfelt essays? Sure. Are they part of the consumer mechanism of production, attraction, consumption, most definitely. Can I love moby because he makes enough money from music to need a management company, unfortunately not. Not because I’m anti-money from music. I recently read that david berman makes 28,000 a year and lives eight blocks or so from me in nashville. I felt great pride both at sharing a city with a songwriter I so respected and that he’s able to almost double my 40hr a week salary doing something much more gratifying. But mr. Moby. Money changes the game for everyone. And if you want to write passionate essays about animal rights, go on ahead, but my friend, be warned your voice is tainted by your success and will continue to be as long as you allow for a distance between you, what you want to say, and the people who want to hear it.
Fin.