Moby
18
[V2; 2002]
Rating: 2.6
Say what you will about Moby, but the guy's always been good for
throwing his audience a left-handed curveball. Back in the mid-90s,
when it seemed safe to assume he was about as popular as he was likely
to get, Richard Melville Hall followed up his mostly Eurodance-inspired
Everything Is Wrong with a grunge record, then followed that
with a disc of film scores and a full-on ambient record under the
bastard alias Voodoo Child. So when Play dropped back in '99,
the oddly infectious mix of scratchy old blues recordings, MIDI
keyboards and programmed drums seemed like an intriguing development
in Moby's sound-- but no one dared assume it would become his
sound. Anyone living within ten miles of a TV or radio pretty much
knows the story from here. Idealistic hipster trades actual idealism
for the 2-D MTV version that-- it turns out-- pays a helluva lot better,
inadvertently scores two-thirds of commercials produced in the following
three years, and oh yeah, there's that whole international superstar thing.
If the threat of never achieving massive superstardom never frightened
Moby into fitting his music into a mold, then the actual attainment of
superstar status has. As a follow-up, 18 plays it safer than a
quadruple-condomed fundamentalist Christian at an abstinence rally.
So, yes, in case you were wondering, 18 does sound a lot like
Play-- almost song-for-song, in fact. But any manager can tell
you that the best way to achieve commercial success is to Stick With
What Works. Here, Moby shows us why he's a star and not a starmaker--
by actually sampling from the same sources! Couldn't get enough of
that chanteuse shrouded in tape hiss who sings, "Ooh Lordy, troubles
so hard," on that Pentium III commercial? Well, here's another one
just like her, singing, "Lordy, don't leave me all by myself." See?
Different. For "In My Heart," Moby sets a crackly old gospel singer
against piano lines that way too closely recall the ones on
"God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" (which, by the way, was
already a mere variation on a Philip Glass piece).
There's plenty more to dislike about 18, like the monotonous
thumps of already-dated drum machines, the painfully repetitive
nature of so many of these sounds, or the simplistic keyboard
noodling in the background of half these songs. Or inconsequential
lyrics like those in the opening track ("People may come together/ And
people may fall apart/ No one can stop us now/ 'Cause we are all made
of stars"), or those that serve as the refrain to "Extreme Ways" ("Oh
baby, oh baby, then it fell apart, it fell apart"). But we're veering
dangerously close into the realm of personal taste, and I see no reason
to reduce my argument to aesthetics, when I know that tons of people
get off on this kind of cheese. But there's plenty of stuff wrong with
18 that's much harder to debate-- stuff that has nothing whatsoever
to do with my personal likes and dislikes.
For one, 18 is such a blatantly commercial affair I can't help
but feel pandered to. Any pretext of cohesiveness is crushed under the
heel of A&R;'s blatant attempts to sell this album to as many demographics
as humanly possible. There's an indie rock song ("Great Escape," featuring
would-be scenesters Azure Ray doing their best Mimi-from-Low impression),
a hip-hop song ("Jam for the Ladies," featuring Angie Stone and MC Lyte),
and, worst of all, a weepy adult contemporary-friendly slow jam featuring
none other than Sinead O'Connor (actual so-sappy-I-fell-off-my-chair-and-broke-my-tailbone-laughing
lyric: "The sadness flows like water and washes down the heartache").
Those songs that aren't graced by guest appearances all sound crafted
from the same mold-- Play-style sampled blues and gospel set
to the same sort of cornily uplifting ambient soundscapes and basic
keyboard noodlery Moby's been mucking around with for years-- though
it sounds less inspired now than ever. For an album three years in
the making, 18 sure does sound like it was tossed together at
the last minute. It would seem Moby's artistic growth has been stunted
by his suddenly packed social schedule. One gets the feeling from the
songs on 18 that Moby's more interested in introducing music
videos and being unfunny with Winona Ryder on Saturday Night Live
than he is in making music.
The only thing that differs from Moby's former work here are the
liner notes. Before Play, Moby had earned a reputation for
the well-crafted, often persuasive essays he included with each
album. He damned cultural conservatism, cigarettes, celebrity and
fundamentalism, while promoting an agenda of conservation,
vegetarianism, and animal and prisoner rights. 18 has merely
two essays: one about the difficulty of writing essays and the
process of creating the album at hand, the other politely suggesting
that everybody be nice to each other. Can someone please explain to
me why, in a time when Moby's voice is louder than ever, and when
cultural conservatism and fundamentalist dogma aims to destroy what
few freedoms we as a nation have left, Moby would choose to back down?
Maybe MTV built an android Moby with the remarkable ability to look
cute in Pumas and to pilfer through the real Moby's back catalog and
rearrange samples. It seems farfetched, but I'd rather suspend some
disbelief than deal with the knowledge than such an idealistic guy
could be so easily corrupted by the system he once seemed to fight
against. Everything is wrong, indeed.
-David M. Pecoraro, May 20th, 2002