Moby

Who says looting can't be an art form? Exactly twenty years ago, Richard Melville Hall, known to friends as Moby, provided an almost irrefutable demonstration of that very idea. And as if that weren't enough, he pushed even further, suggesting an even bolder truth: an album, too, can be raided like a supermarket, as if it were just another product on the shelf. "I only did it so people would listen to my music," he would later explain matter-of-factly, justifying his decision to license all 18 songs from "Play" for ads, films, documentaries and TV shows. The result is that every single note of the album has become common cultural property, seeping under the skin of all of us, just like the infamous chip in "Matrix". As if the popularity weren't proof enough, the numbers speak for themselves: 12 million copies sold (the biggest indie bestseller ever), and nearly two years spent camped out in the charts. A worldwide boom that would go on to seal one of the most acclaimed soundtracks of the turn of the millennium. A stroke of genius, yes, but also a stroke of luck. Because the wiry DJ who grew up in a Connecticut hippie commune had nearly given it all up... But let's rewind the tape - fitting, given the subject - and start again in Manhattan, New York, in the Nineties.

Play it again, Richard

The 90s were the decade of electronic music and unbridled cross-pollination. Like that of Bristol trip-hop, which devours, blends and reassembles every musical scrap it can find. That same mixing of sounds and styles was gospel to young Richard Melville Hall, known as "Moby" in honor of his legendary great-great-uncle Herman Melville (yes, the author of "Moby Dick"). His birth date (September 11, 1965) would forever tie his birthday to a day of national mourning (in 2001 he would watch, stunned, from the roof of his apartment as the Twin Towers came down), and his childhood was no easier, marked by the loss of his father in a car accident when he was just 2 years old. But music never left him, not even through the grim nights spent squatting among addicts in the abandoned hangars and factories of Lower Manhattan. Years of surviving on the margins of yuppie New York, getting by however he could and dreaming of following in the footsteps of his idol David Bowie.

He was still torn between punk and electronic music when he built a solid reputation as a DJ behind the decks at the club MARS, and later with the group Ultra Vivid. Once again, it was his knack for pilfering that came to his rescue: in 1991 he dropped a techno anthem built around the Badalamenti theme from David Lynch's "Twin Peaks". It would sell a million copies and give him his first taste of fame. But the years that followed brought a fresh plunge back into obscurity: he hid behind a string of unlikely aliases (Voodoo Child, Barracuda, UHF, DJ Cake, Lopez, Brainstorm/Mindstorm), put out ambient records, then brought in Mimi Goese, singer of Hugo Largo, for the album "Everything Is Wrong", before returning to punk with the animal-rights-themed "Animal Rights" (Moby is a committed vegan) and to electronic music with "I Like To Score". But it was one flop after another. Italian manager Carlo Martelli recalls "a disastrous showcase at the Rainbow club in Milan attended by 20 people (including the staff), for which only a single ticket had been pre-sold". And yet - he still remembers - "it was such a blistering show that it convinced me to keep pushing the promotion". A hunch that may have proven just as inspired as what came next. Less fortunate was Elektra Records' decision to drop him from the label right before his big moment. It would take a new, far more forward-thinking label, V2, to reap the rewards of the global success of "Play".

From the Mississippi Delta to the dancefloor

All it takes is the push of a button to unlock the vast musical library that is "Play". A brilliant, definitive title for young Melville's magic wild card, the trump that took it all. To assemble his tower of Babel of sounds, he had a stroke of inspiration: dig up the recordings captured by musicologist Alan Lomax on the 1993 collection "Sounds Of The South: A Musical Journey From The Georgia Sea Islands To The Mississippi Delta". But what on earth do those dusty old African-American folk, gospel and spiritual recordings have to do with turn-of-the-millennium electronic music? Plenty, as it turns out, Moby smirks, while he tinkers away with his samples and loops. Take "Honey", the first of nine (nine!) singles, released in 1998 ahead of the album, built around four lines from an a cappella Bessie Jones recording looped more than twenty times: a phenomenal - and irresistibly danceable - sound collage of stolen vocal snippets, funk drumming and a stubborn piano riff, poised somewhere between Fatboy Slim's big beat and the trip-hop manipulations of Massive Attack.

It's one of the record's basic templates. It resurfaces on "Run On" (the second single), a rural ragtime number for the cyber-punk era, with a jazz sample of Bill Landford & The Landfordaires' "Run On For A Long Time" (1947) hurled half a century forward into a disorienting digital pastiche; while it's the blues of Boy Blue's "Joe Lee's Rock" (1960) that provides the spark for "Find My Baby", another bit of magic built entirely on looped vocals, guitar, a driving beat and electric bass, with the sample of a startling female soul voice adding the classic cherry on top.

Everything is duly credited, right down to thanks given to "the Lomaxes" in the booklet - except, oddly, for Vera Hall, the Black Alabama folksinger who wrote the a cappella piece "Trouble So Hard" (1937), sampled on the album's biggest hit, "Natural Blues" (also famous for its video featuring a very young Christina Ricci, and - in Italy - for having soundtracked coverage of the ill-fated Euro 2000). An inexplicable omission, especially considering how crucial the unnatural fusion of that archaic rural blues with the hyper-technological sound around it is to the song's success.

Another borrowed piece is also missing from the credits: the four chords of Ernest Gold's "Fight For Survival" (from the soundtrack to "Exodus", 1960), poured into "Porcelain": a venial sin this time, though, since the song stands perfectly well on its own, buoyed by its shimmering chill-out production, which would also soundtrack a young DiCaprio's adventures in "The Beach": a sinuous pulse, droplets of piano and an aching melody framing the most romantic episode on the record, with Moby murmuring his verses of lost love for an elusive girl. A similar ache runs through the other evergreen, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad": chilling piano and celestial voices courtesy of the Shining Light Gospel Choir, for a contrite, existential ballad as simple as it is intense and heartfelt. Electro-gospel for lost souls at the turn of the century.

Elsewhere, the references don't reach quite so far back in time. Like in the crossover of the driving "Bodyrock", a drum-and-guitar showdown with an aggressive big-beat edge and hip-hop roots borrowed from Spoonie Gee & The Treacherous Three's "Love Rap" (1980); in the lovely downtempo of "Rushing", with its floating piano transplanted into the trip-hop era; or in the dance-rock of "South Side", a warning about young people's desensitization to violence, seasoned with aggressive guitars that nod to the anthems of contemporaries Smashing Pumpkins (originally conceived as a duet with Gwen Stefani, later scrapped due to production issues, the track would eventually be reworked by the No Doubt singer herself).

Even the lesser-known tracks bear witness to the New York imp's inspired run of form, from the ambient shades of the "Inside"-"Guitar Fluide & String" pairing to the hushed Bristol-style lounge of "7" and "Slow Down", by way of the obsessive electronics of "Machete", the dreamlike landscapes of "Everloving" and the chill-out of the nocturnal "The Sky Is Broken" (its drums lifted from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Long As I Can See The Light"), whispered knowingly as it sets up the ghostly farewell of "My Weakness".

Alongside these 18 gems, Moby would release, in 2000, eleven more dispensable "B-Sides" from the singles which, in his own words, "were close to the sound of Play but weren't quite right for the album".

The subliminal commercial

Moby's approach is that of a truly global musician: singer, composer, producer, with recording tracks endlessly spinning through his head. And the studio, far more than the stage, is his natural temple, the laboratory where all his alchemy takes place. Born from the cold fusion of two opposing sonic archetypes (roots blues-gospel and electronic music projected into the 2000s), the blend that is "Play" is remarkably fluid, cohesive and convincing. Alternative just enough, pleasing even more so. A triumph of rhythms and melodies that dares further than anyone could have imagined, in keeping with that reckless urge toward cross-pollination and disguise that would define an entire decade, from DJ Shadow to Portishead. The right record at the right time, released to soothe a generation exhausted by rave parties while lulling in another one just discovering electronic music for the first time.

Less arduous and pioneering than certain strands of trip-hop, the "Moby sound" — definitively crystallized on this album, and never recaptured in its pale sequels — smuggles an encyclopedic sonic universe into the mainstream (that's his original sin as far as the inevitable indie snobs are concerned), making the public absorb it (and here lies the other bit of magic) in a simple, painless way, as if it were something familiar, something they'd always been listening to. Subliminal. Just like one of the countless commercials that would go on to swallow up his music. All it takes is hitting "Play".

Ride the wave of great music

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26/05/2019