Fuck
MOBY
Is this something I really need to elaborate upon? Do you seriously not understand why? I guess you weren't there when I saw him live at raves and watched him run around the stage with a microphone going, "OHHH!!! .... UHHHH!!" while his keyboard (yes I said SINGULAR keyboard) stood lonely onstage. I guess you weren't there when he smashed his singular Yamaha DX7 keyboard as the music MIRACULOUSLY kept playing in perfect time. I was there. I was there five times at various raves around the country and I was not impressed when he stood in a crucifiction-esque pose as the power of the music overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and held out his arms as the music continued to emanate from some mysterious source offstage and not from his now-smashed single YAMAHA DX7 SIMPLE FM WAVEFORM SYNTHESIZER. It's amazing! I never knew the DX7 was a sampler with an onboard sequencer, and yet to my amazement, I was hearing drums and "next is the next is the next is the E" (and no, no, you must be mistaken. Moby, a devout christian, would NEVER sensationalize the drug ecstasy just to appeal to ravers and dig deep into their pockets. He even SAID so in the liner notes on the single. It must have been a song devoted simply to his favorite vowel). Oh, you don't understand why I hate him? Well then, dear friend, you must not have heard it when he said he didn't think it was a bad thing that he performed his "live" sets using a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) player. "What's the difference between hitting play on a sequencer and hitting play on a DAT?" he asked the interviewer smugly. As a musician who's played live with a sequencer, I think I can speak for every other electronic musician when I say, "A FUCKING LOT OF DIFFERENCE! The main differences being that something could actually GO WRONG or SOUND DIFFERENT, or heaven forbid, REQUIRE EFFORT." I'm sure all those kids paid 40 bucks with the intention of seeing Moby play a recording of his album. Why DAT? Because CDs skip. I guess you weren't there when he had the balls, AFTER admitting that his live shows weren't live, to say, "New electronic music doesn't move me. It doesn't really DO anything." Yeah. Nothing could possibly be any more creative and moving than playing the sample "voodoochild" 200 times over the same four bar drumloop for an entire song. Most anyone who analyzes music could recognize that keeping an underground form of music IN the underground is a positive thing. Look what's happened to rap and techno on the occasions that it's come into the mainstream. It has invariably turned to shit. I guess Moby thought he was doing us all a favor when he licensed ALL 18 fucking tracks of his album "Play" to be used in television commercials and movies. That's all I need. People will hear techno and think of Ford Windstars. The soul of music is befouled and lost when the performer is a star first and an artist second. Is he a musicmaker or a moneymaker? People will say I'm being too harsh. They'll point out that he helped us see good things in electronic music way back then. They might forget that he also showed us a lot of things that were wrong about it. When I hear an old skool rock fan saying that Electronic Music is fake, plastic, unfeeling, uncreative, prerecorded, and sold-out commercial shit, how can I face the shame knowing that Moby lives on as proof that sometimes it kinda is?