Moby

Moby

Moby (born Richard Melville Hall, September 11, 1965) is an American songwriter, musician and singer.

He was born in Harlem, New York, and raised in Darien, Connecticut. After eight Top 40 techno singles in the UK in the 1990s, his biggest hit was his album Play, released in 1999, which sold 9 million copies worldwide. He continues to record and release music today.

His parents nicknamed him Moby soon after birth, partly after the novel Moby-Dick, which was written by Herman Melville, his great-great-great-great uncle. He plays keyboard, guitar, bass guitar and drums. He has also released music under the names Voodoo Child, Barracuda, Brainstorm, UHF, The Brotherhood, DJ Cake, Lopez, Mindstorm, Schaumgummi, and Pippy Baliunas He has received attention for his political, environmental and religious beliefs, which he has outlined in the liner notes of his albums.

Music career

Early years

In the early 1980s Moby was in a hardcore punk band called the Vatican Commandos, which released an EP called Hit Squad for God. He became a house disc jockey at The Beat and Media Bender's Instant Gallery in Port Chester, New York from 1985. He graduated from SUNY Purchase with a degree in sociology, and in 1989 signed a recording contract with Instinct Records. During this time, Moby lived in an established artist loft community in Stamford, Connecticut.

He first avoided electronic music as a form of rebellion, believing that to punk rockers, trappings like drum machines, synthesizers, and dance beats, were still tainted by the "disco sucks" stigma of the 1970s. "Ninety percent of me just loved the music," he later said. "But then the fact that I could also piss people off with it, that was satisfying, too."

His first success was "Go", a progressive track using the string line from "Laura Palmer's Theme" from the TV drama Twin Peaks and the shout of "Go!" from the Tones on Tail single of the same name. It reached the UK top ten in October 1991, earned him an appearance on Top of the Pops, and features on his first album, The Story So Far (aka Moby).

In 1991, he also remixed the song "Chorus" from the band Erasure. His remix (named "Vegan Mix") is only featured on the limited CD maxi-single of Erasure's Am I Right? single" In 1993 he toured with The Prodigy, Orbital, and Aphex Twin.

1994–1998

Template:Sound sample box align right Template:Multi-listen start Template:Multi-listen item Template:Multi-listen end Template:Sample box end He released his first album, Everything Is Wrong, on Mute Records in 1995. It earned early critical praise and minor commercial success. (It was distributed in the USA by Elektra Records.) He followed this up in early 1996 with the double album Everything Is Wrong - Mixed and Remixed.

Soon after, his original record company, Instinct, released the B-sides album Rare: The Collected B-Sides 1989-1993. One song on this album, "Thousand," earned him a world record for fastest song, so named as it purported to increase in speed up to 1,000 beats per minute. Later in 1996 he released a hard rock/electronic album called Animal Rights and toured Europe with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Moby usually writes all his own music, occasionally with collaborators, but Animal Rights included a cover version of Mission of Burma's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver."

In 1997, he released I Like to Score, a collection of his music that had been used in movies. Among those tracks was an updated version of the "James Bond Theme" used for the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

Animal Rights and I Like to Score were commercially unsuccessful, and Elektra declined distribution of future Moby releases.

File:Moby-RareDJSet.JPG

Moby performs a rare DJ set at NASA Rewind 04-03-2004 in NYC

1999–2004

Moby's breakthrough album was 1999's Play. It was the first album in history to have all of its tracks commercially licensed (see 'Moby's songs used in other media' below). The album's tracks were eventually accepted in various radio formats, but because of Play's extensive licensing, the album could have been financially successful even without radio play. In a 2005 posting on his website, Moby theorized that his eagerness to license his music is a result of "growing up in poverty".

He followed this in 2002 with 18, an album that had 18 tracks. The most popular song on the album was "We Are All Made of Stars".

Both Play and 18 included many samples from a Library of Congress record folio of Alan Lomax recordings from 1943 that Moby borrowed from a friend, Marc Latzky of The Harry Jingles Band. On CNN, Moby said "I wish I had stories about me getting them myself, hanging out in prisons and farms in Georgia, Atlanta or Alabama, or whatever. But no, I just went around the corner to my old record store and bought the reissues." He actually digitally sampled the original pressings, however.

He founded the Area:One Festival in 2001, a popular touring rock festival that featured an eclectic range of musical genres. A second tour was organized for the following year, during which he also had a brief television show on MTV, Señor Moby's House of Music, which focused mostly on more obscure electronic music.

In 2001, Moby also earned the ire of rapper Eminem after calling his music misogynist and homophobic; Eminem later satirized Moby (among others) in "Without Me", calling him a "36-year-old baldheaded fag" and questioning his relevance, and declaring "Nobody listens to techno!" The two got into a confrontation at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards.

In the next few years, Moby co-wrote "Is It Any Wonder" with Sophie Ellis-Bextor, produced "Early Mornin'" for Britney Spears, and collaborated with Public Enemy on "Make Love, Fuck War", which was released prior to the 2004 presidential election.

2005 onwards

In 2005 Moby released Hotel. Instead of his usual usage of samples, all of the vocals and instruments were performed live in the studio, by Moby and vocalist Laura Dawn, the Cultural Director of MoveOn.org.

Moby continued to work on other projects apart from his albums. He scored the 2005 documentary Earthlings, and made the remix compilation The BioShock EP with Oscar The Punk for the video game BioShock. He also appeared alongside Richard Barone at the T.Rex tribute concert in Central Park on September 29, 2006.

He accepted an offer to score the soundtrack for Richard Kelly's 2007 movie Southland Tales because he was a fan of Kelly's previous film, Donnie Darko. He produced and played on a new version of The Bongos' "The Bulrushes" for a 2007 re-release of their Drums Along The Hudson album. In May 2007, Moby created a website called mobygratis.com, a site from which independent and non-profit filmmakers can download his music for free to use in their productions. There are about 70 Moby tracks available for use (many previously unreleased).

A compilation album of his greatest hits, entitled Go: The Very Best of Moby was released on November 6, 2006, which included a new track, "New York, New York" for which Debbie Harry provided vocals. Different versions of this album have his single "Slipping Away" in different languages and with different co-singers.

On October 4, 2007, moby.com announced the name of his seventh album. Last Night is to be released on March 31, 2008 in the United Kingdom and on April 1 2008 in the USA. The lead single from the album is the song "Alice".

Essays

Many Moby albums include essays that he has written himself in the inlay card. Everything Is Wrong had essays on over-consumption ("We use toxic chlorine bleach to keep our underpants white") and U.S. religious leaders ("Why doesn't the Christian right go out and spread mercy, compassion and selflessness?"), and The End of Everything discussed being a vegetarian ("Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?")

Besides music

Moby is a vegan, and self-proclaimed "simpleton". He has expressed pro-choice views. He lives in New York City's Little Italy, where he has lived for a decade in a small apartment in a five-story building across the street from David Bowie. Until recently he co-owned a small restaurant and tea shop called TeaNY, where he occasionally waited tables. He also organized the Little Idiot Collective, a group of artists.

Moby has signed up to pay $207,000 to become the first pop star to travel into space on the space tourism company Virgin Galactic's VSS Enterprise spaceship in 2010.

In an interview with Psychology Today, Moby stated that when he was 19, he tried LSD and began suffering from panic attacks. He claims that he no longer experiences them as frequently as he used to, but occasionally he will "have too much caffeine, be stressed out about work and be in a relationship that's not going well, and it will happen again." He is very open about this in an attempt to help fans who suffer from similar panic disorders.

Activism

Moby is an advocate for a variety of causes, working with MoveOn and PETA, among others. He created MoveOn Voter Fund's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest along with singer/MoveOn Cultural Director Laura Dawn and MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser.

He also actively engages in nonpartisan activism, and serves on the Board of Directors of Amend.org , a nonprofit that implements injury prevention programs in Africa.

Moby is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing scientific inquiry on music and the brain and to developing clinical treatments to benefit people of all ages . He has also performed on various benefit concerts to help increase awareness for music therapy and raise funds for the Institute. In 2004, he was honored with the IMNF’s "Music Has Power Award" for his advocacy of music therapy and for his dedication and support to its recording studio program.

He is an advocate of network neutrality and he testified before a House of Representatives committee debating the issue in 2006.

When asked about drugs, he responded: "I'm sort of a libertarian. People should be able to do what they want. I ultimately defer the wisdom to an adult to make their own choices. If someone wants to do drugs, I think it's their own business and not the business of the state."

Faith

In a 2003 BBC interview, Moby speaks about his encounter with the Gospels, "In about 1985 I read the teachings of Christ and was instantly struck by the idea that Christ was somehow divine. When I say I love Christ and love the teachings of Christ I mean that in the most simple and naive way. I'm not saying I'm right." In a September 20, 2006 audio interview with Sojourners Magazine, he says, "I read the New Testament, specifically the gospels and I was struck at their divinity, feeling that humans could not have figured this out on their own. We're just not bright enough." He also discusses his faith on his own weblog. On January 19, 2007, in his reaction to seeing Alexandra Pelosi's Friends of God, a film about evangelism in the United States, Moby writes, "The movie reminded me just how utterly disconnected the agenda of the evangelical Christian right is from the teachings of Christ." In other interviews, Moby has stated that he doesn't consider himself to be a Christian.

Discography

Main article: Moby discography

Videography

• Play: The DVD (2001)
• 18 B Sides + DVD (2003)
• Moby Presents: Alien Sex Party (2003)
• The Hotel Tour 2005 (2006)
• Go: The Very Best of Moby (2006)

10 albums

Biographies

• Moby: Replay, 2001 Olmstead Press Paperback ISBN 1-58754-011-8

External links

• Official site / journal
• Moby page at Mute Records web site
• Listings of all Moby albums and music sampler
• Moby Interview
• Interview with Moby
• Moby discusses Southland Tales
• Moby-Fan.com (french)