Title:18 By: Moby Released by: V2 Released on: May 14, 2002 Rating (out of 10): 4 Date: 05/22/2002
Wherein Moby Loses Every Ounce of Credibility He May Have Once Had
Me, I want to know what gets Moby off. Because it sure as hell ain’t music. With 18, I want so much to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he makes it difficult when he tells Rolling Stone that he wants “to make compassionate records that meet a need in someone’s life”(RS897), but neglects to mention that, once he makes those records, he intends to sell them to the highest bidder (hell, any and every bidder); when he attempts to convince SPIN Magazine that “We Are All Made Of Stars” is “mostly about quantum physics” (June 2002) (uh-huh, just like “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” is about coronary thrombosis) instead of calling a spade a spade and declaring it the bland, inoffensive and meaningless lead single that it is; when he constantly sets up preemptive strikes against attacks on his own coolness with redundant and transparent self-deprecation, which he would love to pass off as irony, though it really just stalls at false modesty. (“Maybe this record will sell 47 copies,” he says in 18’s liner notes, “If so, I send my heartfelt thanks to you 47 people.”)
Worse, the personality that Moby parades around for the late-night talk show circuit has a direct bearing on the listenability of 18 because his self-reinvention as an upper-echelon pop star means, as CultureDose’s Jody Beth Rosen would say, that as soon as you buy the album, you buy all the cultural trappings that go along with it. Yeah, I want to give Moby the benefit of the doubt, but there he goes, pissing on me and telling me it’s raining.
18 begins with a drumbeat reminiscent of the opening to The Strokes’ Is This It, and while that may seem like a trifle, it becomes emblematic of Moby’s intentions throughout the album. He doesn’t want to create that new “compassionate record” as much as he wants to recycle the old compassion, mining the pop world for things already familiar, sentimental, and—most importantly—cool, just as he did on Play by riding the wave that Fatboy Slim began with “Praise You.” He has to implement the cycle, see? Moby creates the cool music, and the cool music, in turn, creates the cool Moby who, in turn, creates cool music and so on. Eventually, nobody knows which came first, the cool music or the cool Moby.
Of course, Moby cool mostly recycles vintage Moby. He nicks the ephemeral piano from “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” to use on “In My Heart,” “South Side” morphs into the repulsive “Jam For the Ladies,” and the sustained keyboard scales that showed up in Moby’s repertoire as far back as “Go” permeate… well… EACH AND EVERY SONG. Again, I would excuse this as a compulsive Richie Hawtin-style obsession with these sounds, if it weren’t for the media blitzkrieg of Play which ensured that each track off that album would ingrain itself in the collective unconscious via advertisements, elevator music, and movie soundtrack appearances. As Hawtin and various other faceless anti-Mobys will attest, ingenuity and/or integrity don’t sell records; familiarity does. So the worldwide sales of Play skyrocketed. 18 will likely do the same by spoon-feeding Moby’s audience more of what they already know and love (or, at least, what BMW has told them they should know and love.)
It still wouldn’t come off so badly if Moby took his old sounds and improved them, but he doesn’t. The most touted formula on Play—the coupling of gospel samples with vaguely electronic sounds—resulted in music with a grand emotional sweep, by using the gospel samples as the driving force of their songs—the rhythm, essentially—while the rest of the music twists and turns underneath them. In a blatant but misguided attempt to capitalize on that success, 18 makes the gospel samples the show. “In This World,” for example, takes a sweet, effective vocal clip and enhances it with only a rudimentary keyboard line and canned backbeat. If the samples themselves didn’t retain the earthy power of their vocalists, the songs would fail completely, but somehow the vocal performances on “In This World,” “In My Heart,” “One of These Mornings,” “Another Woman,” “Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday),” and “I’m Not Worried At All” more than make up for the redundant musicianship—partially because Moby knows how to pick heartstring-pulling phrases (sample lyrics: “Lordy, don’t leave me all by myself,” and “One of these mornings/It won’t be very long/You will look for me/And I’ll be gone.”); partially because Moby manages to distill pieces from his obviously excellent record collection into such butt ass simple sentiment that their emotional power gets hard to deny.
When he veers from using others’ work for his own nefarious purposes, though, he gets into bigger trouble. Of the songs on 18 on which Moby himself sings, only “Signs of Love” registers even the slightest bit of emotion, and it’s marginal at best. He fares no better coaxing equally dull performances out of Azure Ray, MC Lite and Sinead O’Connor, and should instantly lose all credibility for forcing poor Angie Stone to sing, “One thing’s fo’ sho’/ Moby got soul.” (Wait a second. Is she saying that Moby has soul “for sure”… or “for Show”?) Thankfully, he keeps the drippy New Age instrumentals that saturated Play to a minimum.
Yet, in a strange way, Moby may have arrived at the fullest realization of his musical purpose—assuming that purpose is shilling blatant sentimental pandering to big business as sales jingles. Each track on 18 provides the perfect commercial-ready musical fix—catchy as hell, but horrendously insubstantial. Unfortunately, Moby dresses this up in a pretense of loftier goals. “It’s my humble hope that other peoples’ lives might be better for having listened to what I’ve created,” he says in his liner notes. Isn’t that nice? Moby wants to teach the world to sing. And, in the meantime, make an assload of money.
It’s not so much the fact that Moby sold his soul to Starbucks that bothers me, as it is his reluctance to admit it. Every track on 18 seems primed for whittling down to 30 seconds. So why not make an album full of TV commercial-length tracks? I’d guess it’s because Moby can’t admit to himself that he’s a whore. That’s why I want to know what gets him off. Seems to me like Moby may have achieved exactly what he wanted with 18, but won’t let himself enjoy his success. That doesn’t sound like any fun at all.
