More Moby

I finished the Moby book (see previous post).  I'm definitely on the Moby bandwagon.  I realize I'm pretty late to the party.  His monster album "Play" was a 1999 release, and I guess it took the world by storm in 2000.  So yeah, 11 years late.

But isn't that the story of pop culture?  People create works of the moment and then the moment passes and then well, sometimes stuff lasts or comes back or disappears.  And really you are free to dip into work from any time and era.  

And you connect with it when you can, or you don't.  And in the world of pop culture what's good or bad is really up to you.  I mean there's the critics and the press, and they can sort of put the microscope on certain performers, but there is this vast pool of work that you can discover for yourself.

And some stuff is really so connected to a time and place, and it doesn't transcend that time and place, or some stuff is of a time and place, and transcends that time and place too.  

And you can choose to like stuff because everyone else likes it, or you can choose to like stuff because no one else likes it, or you can choose stuff to like just because.  Or then again, maybe what you like sort of chooses you?

So I come to Moby through a book, which is weird, usually you come to the music through your ears.  But everything in the book (a slight read), just hit me in the right spot.  I love Moby's sense of play, his sampling of pop culture from all eras, his melding of electronic music and dance music, and the blues, and punk too.

Seems Moby has drawn lots of love and lots of hate too.  Funny that the Little Idiot (a nickname Moby decided to embrace) became such a polarizing figure.  Every track from "Play" was licensed by either the movies, commercials, TV spots.  This is either really creepy or really cool or really irrelevant.  But obviously it helped Moby become stealthily ubiquitous and to kind of insidiously slip into our pop consciousness.

"I'm not a very good star.  I'm little.  And I'm bald." - Moby