I find it kind of striking that in the fifteen years — jeezus — that I’ve been composing this silly blog, I don’t seem to have ever mentioned the artist Moby beyond a passing invocation. I mean, it’s not like I was ever a massive fan of the guy, but I certainly had nothing against him. The most notable aspect of Moby with respect to the usual thrust of this blog is that he was formerly the upstairs neighbor of my friend Sean when they both lived on Mott Street just south of Houston. They’ve both moved on since (Sean went to Brooklyn, Moby went … somewhere else), but Sean did have one kinda dreadful anecdote about living beneath the man, that being a genuinely unfortunate plumbing mishap wherein Sean’s furniture became splattered with Moby’s …um… sewage in the wake of a burst pipe. Hey, this is what happens when you decide to live in a rustic old SoHo loft space, I guess.
In terms of Moby as a musician, I certainly own a few of his records, among them, of course, Play, the album that made him a household name — I believe my mother-in-law actually owned her own copy of that disc. It was Play that transformed him from a nebbishy underground electronic wunderkind into a bona fide celebrity — however awkwardly. It was then that the worm turned, so to speak, and Moby became a weird kind of irritant for a lot of folks. He seemed to develop a knack for putting his foot in it.
One example of this was when Moby asserted in Steven Blush’s strangely divisive documentary “American Hardcore” that he fleetingly sang for sludgy hardcore legends Flipper. Suffice to say, Flipper denied the claim, and the fallout from same seemed to cost Moby a deal of credibility (although, to be fair, there is video). This episode, however, was small potatoes compared to the brouhaha that ensued when Moby published a memoir — his second — in 2019, wherein he alleged a lurid involvement with actress Natalie Portman. Like Flipper before her, Portman shot down that claim, and the backlash was swift and brutal.
In the wake of that, Moby understandably went a bit quiet. I cannot say I’ve followed his professional trajectory too closely, but I was bemused to find he recently taped an episode of “Turned Out a Punk,” the podcast of erstwhile Fucked Up lead singer Damien Abraham (you may remember I mentioned this podcast when they interviewed Lydia Lunch). Given Moby’s pre-fame/pre-notoriety days in punk rock (he played in Connecticut bands AWOL and The Vatican Commandoes, back in the day), he was certainly a good “get” for Damien’s program. Discovering, this morning, that my trusty-if-anachronisic iPod was out of juice, I opted to listen to Damien interview Moby on my iPhone.
If you’re curious to hear more bits about Moby’s priapic entanglements, you won’t find those there, but Moby does delve into his days as a nascent suburban punk rocker, and discusses visiting some notable Manhattan record stores this blog holds dear like Rocks In Your Head, Bleecker Bob’s, Sounds etc., along with his experiences as some hardcore shows at the Ritz, The Mudd Club and some others. If you’re a fan of that sort of stuff, as I am, it’s worth your time.
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