Richard Hall likes to caricature himself as a little idiot. The artwork of his Bring Back My Happiness single bore this cartoon, and during his astounding rise to stardom, it's proved to be strategically expedient for Hall. It's effective because he can step out from behind this self-effacing graphic he's been able to make his pro-choice, pro-vegan, pro-crimpolene, pro-dandelion pronouncements, and then retreat rapidly with a disingenuous shrug of his shoulders. He thinks he can safeguard himself from criticism with this shielding multiple personality disorder.

His music is similarly contrived and similarly schizoid. When his breakthrough single, "Go," was released, the NME championed Moby as the face of the faceless, the star in the techno firmament. I remember reading the short profile piece, which concentrated on just two things: Richard Hall's familial relationship to Herman Melville; and his plundering of Angelo Badalamenti's theme to "Twin Peaks." He didn't have any radical agenda at this time, and if he did, he was wisely keeping tight-lipped. The first inkling we got of the outraged star of techno was when an ad agency plundered "Go" for a commercial for some turbo-nutter-bastard of a new car. Moby objected to the use of his song as he did not wish to be associated with the product. Fair enough.

His political self became blatant in the sleeve notes of the 1995 album, Everything is Wrong, from which this Elektra retrospective compilation draws much of its content. From the somber "Hymn" and the ambient pomposity of "God Moving Over the Face of the Water" to the pop-dance pizazz of "Everytime You Touch Me"-- all compiled on Mobysongs-- Moby proved he was a professional in the studio and could turn out gleaming, polished product for his corporate masters. In July 1994, under his Voodoo Child guise, he released his Horses/Demons 12". It blew me away. Two tracks-- each at least 20 minutes long-- of rough, powerful, intense, rolling techno. It was Moby, but without the soda-pop froth and the baggage. Needless to say, you're going to have to hunt for that 12" 'cause Elektra hasn't gone beyond the tried-and-true for this compilation.

What the label has put together here is all the stuff that recent converts can get into. The success of Moby's Play has forced Elektra to rifle through their Moby back catalog and market that innocuous material to the millions-- material that largely falls into the same shimmering, rinky-dink techno one hears in sporty car ads. The label has stayed well clear of the punk-rawkk that crowded 1996's Animal Rights. On that album, Moby stretched back to his roots in Darien, Connecticut, and suburban angst, and managed to piss off virtually everyone in the process. Pretty punk rock, eh?

As though in apologetic recompense to his label for fucking up their bottom line, he released I Like to Score. For those Players out there, this is the Moby album that will most appeal. Its melodramatic and witless "Novia" appears on this compilation, complete with polyphonic choirs and a tinkling "porcelain" piano. Hell, his version of the James Bond theme is exactly what you'd expect, and worse still, Joy Division's cathartic "New Dawn Fades" is moistened into a "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" FM-enabled alt-rock style.

Though Moby was techno's first big name, he's derided for his banalization of the style. As this compilation proves, he's musically unadventurous (case in point: "First Cool Hive" is propped up by the same beat as Milli Vanilli's "Girl, You Know It's True"). One can't even imagine Jeff Mills or Richie Hawtin spinning a Moby 12"! But as the Soundscan charts of Play have shown, familiarity and timidity sell by the boatload.

In order to make the big cash-in and realize his bankable potential, Moby had to break away from the techno collective. He broke the brotherhood's code of anonymity and invisibility (the state implicit in the Rising High t-shirt slogan "Faceless Techno Bollocks"). But hard on the heels of visibility comes vulnerability. Nonetheless, Richard Hall chose to define himself more by his polemic than his music. Unfortunately for Moby, his music isn't robust enough to withstand criticism (despite what Spin might claim), nor resilient enough to shield him from attacks on his political stance.

Perhaps he sensed this inadequacy when Play was released. For these days, Hall affects embarrassment about his former moral frothings and awkwardly dismisses them in interviews (cf. interview in Muzik, July 2000). And the success of the album is, in my opinion, due to his earlier and conscionable attempts to force techno into the mainstream. Play would not sell as well were its tracks not the soundtracks for prime time TV commercials. (You'll notice that Moby's self-righteous refusal to licence tracks has vanished since "Go" was released.) His pushing for mass culture's acceptance of techno has had killing consequences.

Richard Hall made the classic Faustian pact with Satan. He's successful, rich, gets to shag whomever he wishes (though he claims that he's very reticent to participate in the Bacchanals on the Bush/Moby tour bus). But Satan and his major labels have forcibly evicted techno from the underground and declawed it. Richie Hawtin, Surgeon, DJ Rolando and so many others deserve high praise for trying to keep the genre in its prelapsarian state; but how many more Hollywood multiplex blockbusters or mulitimedia mega-mergers will it take to cleanse the earth of their pioneering, awkward noise? To be fair to Richard Hall, if it weren't him who fellated Satan's almighty pecker, it would have been someone else. It's inevitable-- look how rock, jazz, and rap have been irrevocably trivialized.

But what do we expect? We live in a relatively untroubled time. Moby provides the ideal saccharine soundtrack to these all-terrain vehicle times. You might as well get in-- the slide downhill is steeper than the Little Idiot's let on.

-Paul Cooper