Many of the reasons this is currently Moby’s moment have little to do with the music on his new album, “18.” There was a vacancy in the hip new thing department, and Moby, fresh from the sales triumph of “Play,” was a decent if awkward fit. The media’s newly rapturous embrace of the bald, bespectacled electronic music veteran — he’s recently been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, Spin, Wired and Entertainment Weekly (next to David Bowie) and was profiled on CNN — suggests just how little else is going on in the mainstream music world. Teen pop is going into merciful decline, above-ground hip-hop is being smothered by its own bling-bling clichés and the hysterical condemnations of Bill O’Reilly simply aren’t enough to convince anyone that there’s any oppositional energy left in the short-attention-span theater of rap-rock. The field is wide open.
So now, with nearly every scrap of vitality leached from the dance music scene that Moby helped pioneer, he’s getting his quarter-hour of public veneration. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve it; despite the reflexive dismissal of too-cool dance music purists, Moby is simply better at what he does than the hordes of hipsters working in the same vein. Many of the tracks on “18″ are very good. A few are sublime. “At Least We Tried,” a heart-splitting ballad of failed love with caressing vocals by Freedom Bremner, is the loveliest song I’ve heard this year. The advance acclaim for “18″ isn’t undeserved (at least not entirely), it’s just weirdly late, as if journalists had discovered punk in 1984.
Yet at the same time, part of the reason electronic music is currently so anemic is because its defining ideas have already been absorbed into the larger culture, finally making it ripe, after more than a decade, for the genre’s first true crossover artist. Electronic beats and loops are now thoroughly integrated into MTV-land, from the Neptunes’ dirty rhythms on Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U” to the high-tech effects by Sly and Robbie and William Orbit on No Doubt’s “Rock Steady.” In that sense, Moby is less an ambassador for an alien genre than a member of a club whose rules he helped create.
Along with hip-hop, electronic music elevated the producer to artist status. At the same time, as hip-hop and electronic artists collaborated, traded cameos and remixed each other’s songs, they broke down rigid models of pop authorship. Pop stars could no longer be divided into bands and soloists. Instead, they floated about, joining together for an album, a song or a moment in a song. The idea that a track like “Harbour,” on “18,” could be sung by Sinéad O’Connor but credited to Moby is no longer strange. Vocalists on “18″ include Angie Stone, MC Lyte and the Shining Light Gospel Choir, but it’s clearly a Moby record. (Still, it’s not surprising that the relatively weak “We Are All Made of Stars,” on which Moby himself sings like a proper pop star, was the first single).
Partly, the attention being lavished on “18″ is a response to the media’s failure to anticipate the tidal success of Moby’s last record, 1999′s “Play,” which surprised everyone by selling more than 9 million copies. By combining old field recordings of roughly incandescent African-American spirituals with crystalline electronic production, Moby brilliantly updated the house music formula of recycled diva vocals and disco beats.
Beyond that, “Play” radically changed the way music is marketed. As Gerald Marzorati reported in the New York Times, every song on “Play” was licensed to a commercial, TV show or movie at least once. By insinuating itself into the very fabric of the culture rather than blazing forth into the public eye, the music became ubiquitous in a whole new way, as did Moby. He’s always been interested in soundtracks. “Go,” his first hit, looped music from “Twin Peaks,” and he took a crack at the James Bond theme for 1997′s “Tomorrow Never Dies.” His 1997 record “I Like to Score” was a combination of music he made for films like “Scream” and “The Saint” and soundtrack-derived songs like “Go.” Suddenly, with “Play,” he’d created what sometimes seemed like the soundtrack to the entire world.
As amazing as the repercussions of “Play” were, Moby has said that he’s never aspired to do anything new. On “18,” he doesn’t. Instead, “18″ distills the most influential down-tempo electronic music of the ’90s into a record as smooth as beach glass. Some songs recall early Massive Attack, while others channel Air and Beth Orton’s collaborations with William Orbit. The celestial strings and aquatic pings on the title song are pure Craig Armstrong, while the gospel loops of “In My Heart” and “One of These Mornings” could have been on Moby’s own “Play.” “18″ is an alchemy of soul and new wave, with elements of hip-hop and disco. Conceptually, there’s nothing novel here, which is why on the surface Moby’s sudden ascendance into the limelight seems random.
Like “Play,” “18″ is distinctive without being original, in that it represents the final transformation of an underground sound into pure pop. “Play’s” ubiquitous “Porcelain” — featured in the film “The Beach,” Nordstrom ads and several TV shows — took the dreamy cascades of groups like Hooverphonic and polished them to a high gloss. Like Massive Attack and Stars, Moby’s music contains myriad currents of darkness, but it’s darkness of a significantly different, more marketable kind.
Instead of Massive Attack’s struggling weariness on songs like “Protection” and the gut-churning dread of tracks like “Sly” and “Angel,” Moby’s blackness is pristinely romantic. It makes despair seem beautiful and noble rather than creepy. While you listen to it, the world takes on a sepia Sunday cast. “Sleep Alone” was originally a song about a couple dying together; in the wake of Sept. 11, he changed the lyrics to make the meaning more elusive, but the pain in it is still of the most rarefied and delicious kind.
That’s not meant pejoratively. It is certainly true that Moby has done more than anyone else to lift electronic music out of the underground. But that underground had long since stopped being a vital or interesting place. If “18″ is more accessible and lustrous than the vast majority of electronic music, that’s partly because Moby is oriented toward the mainstream, and partly because he’s an impeccable producer. Electronic music is so easy to make that it drastically lowered the bar for anyone who wanted to call themselves a musician; the resulting homemade simplicity defined the aesthetic but also limited it. Moby is a genuine pop composer who happens to work electronically. He’s slicker than most of his peers, but he’s also more talented.
At least, he’s talented as a producer. Fame has ruined him in one way: He now insists on singing. Moby’s voice is a thin, brittle thing. It doesn’t even come close to the kind of ugly beauty of a Stephin Merritt or a Leonard Cohen, who somehow sing amazingly without being amazing singers.
The last time Moby sang this much was on his disastrously received 1996 rock record, “Animal Rights.” This time, he takes the lead vocal on four songs, and while they’re processed enough to be enjoyable, the tracks where other people sing are so superior that it’s hard not to be disappointed whenever his voice appears. He’s like Quentin Tarantino, who can’t act yet insists on casting himself in otherwise good movies.
Yet just as Tarantino couldn’t spoil “Pulp Fiction,” Moby’s croaking doesn’t ruin “18.” The record is familiar territory for anyone who’s been listening to electronic music for a while, but then again, the fetish for musical novelty (as opposed to musical skill) is what fueled the underground’s manic trend cycles and ultimately exhausted the genre. People can blather about selling out and cashing in, but just as Tarantino, however annoying he may be, remains an exponential improvement over, say, Jerry Bruckheimer, Moby’s music beats almost everything that’s on the radio. This album will probably be the soundtrack of the next “18″ months. That that’s a pleasant prospect is the most important thing about it.
This is the second story in the Trust Me On This series, which runs through Father's Day. You can read the other entries
here. Dear Kiddos,
Hey, you turkeys. Listen up. I need you to listen for five minutes. I’m going to impart a little wisdom. You can take it or leave it. For what it’s worth, I’d rather you took it.
The advice is this: David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory” is a perfect album, and, since perfect albums are a rare commodity, it is worthy of deep and repeated listenings.
I’m listening to “Hunky Dory” as I write this. How many times have I listened to this, my favorite record? Like a million? And it never gets old.
I discovered “Hunky Dory” by accident. I was a sad, lonely little kid. Eleven years old and obsessed with Joan Jett, another artist I imagine you kids would enjoy. Back then, the radio was still a real thing that people listened to, believed in and learned from. I stayed up past my bedtime one Saturday night during the Christmas holiday to listen to a weekly show called “The King Biscuit Flower Hour” featuring a concert by my secret girlfriend, Joan Jett. At the end of the set, she played a cover of a song that would forever change the course of my budding musical tastes, “Rebel Rebel.” As it turned out, “Rebel Rebel” would never be one of my favorite Bowie tunes, but I could detect, within its lyric, a narrative voice to which I could relate. Like really relate.
I was a latchkey kid, a thing that no longer exists. Both of my parents worked, so every weekday after school, I had a few hours wherein I could do whatever the heck I wanted. What I usually wanted to do was go to Half Price Books & Records. The next Monday, released from the grim confines of Armstrong Elementary, I walked to Half Price where I found exactly one David Bowie album. I brought home “Hunky Dory,” marveling at its weird, androgynous cover. In those pre-Internet days, one was always left with questions. Is that David Bowie on the album cover? Is that person a guy or a lady? Is it a painting or some sort of artsy photo? Is this even rock ‘n’ roll, or is it some other kind of music, the name of which has been kept a secret from me?
It was just that, some other, new kind of music. New to me, anyway. This album, recorded when I had been less than a year old, opened doors for me. And I thought I caught a glimpse of my own future. My family’s house on Gillon Avenue was empty when the needle dropped on Side A. “Changes,” turned up to top volume, was my anthem from the first line of the first verse. “Still don’t know what I was waiting for,” indeed. This was what I had been waiting for. Putting up with all the cruel dullards in my grade school, all the teachers and coaches, all the stupid kids and mean adults, had been almost unbearable. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.
“Hunky Dory” is not a kids’ record, but there is certainly a preponderance of imagery relating to childhood. “Changes” speaks of “these children that you spit on.” “Oh You Pretty Things” has the song’s object driving his “mama and papa insane.” In “Kooks,” the singer begs his own kid to stay, reassuring the lucky little guy that “we believe in you.” At the time, I needed to hear that sentiment. I went back to it over and over again throughout the difficult years of adolescence. David Bowie was not my dad, but he was there in a pinch.
As the album goes on, it gets weirder. And deeper. And darker. “Quicksand” offers up an epic take on the human experience, turning on a phrase that would echo dangerously throughout those most perilous years of my youth, “knowledge comes with death’s release.” I didn’t understand, but I did understand, if you catch my drift. These were meditations on the difficulty of everyday life, and the insane nature of our very existence. Heavy, beautiful stuff.
Antidotes appear in the record’s latter portion. “Happiness is happening/dragons have been bled … fear’s just in your head,” Bowie proclaims in the goofy-but-right-on “Fill Your Heart.” Then he proceeds to introduce the listener to Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. And then comes “Queen Bitch,” wherein we meet Bowie’s longtime foil, the most underrated guitarist in rock history, Mick Ronson. The riff in “Queen Bitch” hints at what is to come on Bowie’s next LP, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” Bowie’s breakthrough album, but “Hunky Dory” is still pre-fame Bowie at his folkie best.
Finally, he leaves us with the epic poem that is “Bewlay Brothers.” As an 11-year-old, I played it repeatedly in an attempt to decipher this song’s meaning. I wrote out the lyrics in my journal, hoping to make sense of them. To no avail. I did know that something had gone horribly wrong, there was madness and sadness, and then the record was over. Just like that.
Again and again, I listened. Memorized. Marveled. Sang along. When I could take it no longer, I found a guitar teacher and learned how to do these things myself. Well, not exactly these things, but my own version thereof. My early songs were such a pale imitation of early-’70s Bowie, that I could have been sued — had anyone ever heard my early songs. It’s quite possible that I spent the whole of my teenage years singing with an English accent. As they say, mistakes were made.
I never got over Bowie. Especially “Hunky Dory.” Many of his other records have remained favorites: “Low,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Station to Station.” But “Hunky Dory” was my first love. I caught a lot of grief for my borderline-obsessive Bowie fandom. Kids at school used it as ammunition in their attacks on my masculinity. Did I care? Sure. Did I care enough to throw Bowie under the bus and pretend to withdraw my admiration for this artist who set me on the path I knew I was destined to follow? Hell no. David Bowie was and is my hero.
Listen, kids: I want you to hear “Hunky Dory” because I think you will love it. Like I said, it’s a perfect record, and how often do those come along? But the real reason I want you to listen to “Hunky Dory” is because, in its 11 tracks, you will find the clues that will lead you to an understanding of me, your dad. You’ll see signposts pointing the way to the path I chose in life.
Making music for a living isn’t easy. Many things about it are tough as hell: The touring and its requisite absences; the self-absorption; the occasional financial insecurity; the mood swings one attributes to the “artistic personality.” This life, however, is what I was made for. This calling is the only one I’ve ever known. I’m not curing cancer or solving the global hunger crisis. I’m making music. But there is a certain hazy nobility in that vocation. Somewhere, an 11-year-old kid may be putting on an album of mine and discovering that the universe isn’t a meaningless jumble of coincidences, that there is purpose to be found in these three-minute constructions of music and lyrics. Some small but elegant meaning.
Heck, before you guys came along, that was all I had. The great thing is that now I have everything.
This article originally appeared on
Imprint.
“When did music become so important?” That’s Don Draper from last week’s “Mad Men,” set in 1966. Later in the episode he turns off “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the Beatles album “Revolver,” and walks out of the room.
art: Rick Griffin
There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Draper? One year later, Rolling Stone magazine will make its debut, followed soon by “Rock and Other Four Letter Words.”
“Rock,” a 250-plus-page Bantam paperback, was published in January 1968 and subtitled “Music of the Electric Generation.” It was one of the first books of its kind, chronicling a cultural revolution that was still in the midst of its own creation. Crammed with black-and-white portraits of bands and musicians, it’s part oral history, part visual LSD trip. One of its fold-out spreads has an intricate, circuitlike diagram that connects over a hundred names, from the Butterfield Blues Band, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds to Busby Berkeley, Brubeck and Bach.
The editor-designer was a writer named J Marks. The photographer for most of the images was Linda Eastman, who went on to work for Rolling Stone and — oh, yes — marry Paul McCartney.
By the sheer force of its graphic presentation, ”Rock and Other Four Letter Words” conveys the mid-1960s music scene’s spirit, vitality and relevance.
“In this hour of the ever-changing season, may our tears not douse the fire in our hearts.”
That’s a guy named Michael Pless singing “Something’s Got to Give.” Even without hearing the song, you can surely imagine the essential elements: Plaintive acoustic strumming, an earnest vocal, and an air of polite outrage to match the stilted syntax and hoary platitudes. Welcome to “Occupy This Album,” the collection of protest-minded songs released by Occupy Wall Street. Sprawling across four CDs and a slew of bonus digital tracks, this behemoth set includes 100 (why not 99?) new and previously released tracks from artists representing a range of generations, genres, backgrounds, settings, and styles. Folkies join hands with rappers; ominous post-rock marches alongside peppy radio pop. There’s spoken-word poetry, tribal percussion, earnest singer-songwriter fare. Even a bit of jazz.
Especially with Occupy reaching a crossroads in summer 2012 — a time when it needs to reassess its ideals, its accomplishments, its methods and its artifacts — “Occupy This Album” plays like a state-of-the-field survey of the protest song. From Jeff Mangum covering the Minutemen to the anonymous drum circles that soundtracked the demonstrations in real time, music has been a constant presence in the movement, although it’s not quite clear what role it has played. The new album portrays a movement with a broad scope and an admirably varied constituency, but the same criticisms that have been leveled against Occupy can also be applied to “Occupy This Album:” There is general unease but no clear direction forward. There is outrage but no plan. There is deep feeling but no clear message.
Ostensibly, there should be something on “Occupy This Album” for everyone to love, but that also means there is more than enough here for everyone to hate. It’s an unwieldy tracklist, almost daring you play it front to back. Of course, it’s pointless to review a 100-track release the same way you would approach a studio album, where functionality and some sense of logical progression are crucial. But there’s no consistent development of political or musical ideas weaving these songs together, nothing to link them or to justify this particular sequencing. As a result, “Occupy This Album” cannot make a statement as an album. In one sense, this release mirrors the leaderless ethos of the movement, which stridently preserves the democracy of the demonstrations. While that idea has certainly energized the Occupy protest, it makes for an amorphous blob of music and a messy, often frustrating listening experience.
But they mean well, right? It’s a charity album after all, with each disc sold separately and with all proceeds benefiting Occupy directly. You’d probably be better off contributing directly to the cause and just making your own mix of politically minded music. You might even have some of these songs in your iTunes already, although why you’d want to include Lucinda Williams’ drippy “Blessed” or Mogwai’s interchangeable “Earth Division” is beyond me.
The music that actually is new — that purports to find direct inspiration in either the righteousness of the demonstrators or the plight of the 99 percent — is generally unimaginative, hokey, disappointingly safe. Most of these artists address these economic issues either through narrative or through high-minded rhetoric. The latter produces the most lackluster results: Jackson Browne’s “Which Side Are You On?” which he has been touting for several months now, turns out to be political white noise, a gentle fist bump to the like-minded that barely puts across either side of the debate. At least it’s better than My Pet Dragon’s epiphany on “Love Anthem”: “Only love can save us now.” To their credit, they sing it like they might actually believe it.
The storytellers have more success, if only because they’re willing to entertain a bit more grit, a bit less blind hope. Featuring Joan Baez and Steve Earle, James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here” sounds downright curmudgeonly as it surveys the state of the working class in an economy that regularly sends its manufacturing jobs overseas. The song, however, goes a bit overboard when the trio decry litterbugs and graffiti artists.
One of the true standouts among these 100 tracks is Richard Barone’s ditty “Can I Sleep on Your Futon?” about a veteran-turned-singer who couch-surfs from one generous soul to the next. The verses are specific and soulful, as through he’s derived them explicitly from lived experience, and in that regard, the song could function as commentary on the music biz. But Barone stumbles over that massively awkward chorus, “Can I sleep on your futon?” It’s hard to imagine a crowd of protesters singing along.
If there is one overarching theme here, it is, vaguely, “history.” The past informs and even defines this music. Even the very idea of this type of compilations seems like a throwback to the CD’s heyday in the 1990s, when seemingly every charity, from NARAL to the Red Hot Organization, had its own release. It’s an impression reinforced by much of the music, especially hip-hop tracks by Born I Music and George Martinez & the Global Block Collective, whose lyrics and beats sound like they were scavenged from 1994. (For a better example of how hip-hop can address political themes, check out Killer Mike’s new track “Reagan.”)
Of course, there is a lot of folk music on “Occupy This Album.” That style has proved one of the most politicized musical forms of the 20th century, as lefties in the 1930s and 1940s adopted labor songs as battle cries. Clean-scrubbed, buttoned-up folkies like the Kingston Trio had some chart success in the 1950s, but they were quickly rendered obsolete by the Village bohemians reimagining the music as a vehicle for countercultural sentiments. That’s the model so many Occupyers are reverently appropriating, never suspecting that it might not be a natural fit for 21st-century dissent. The folk revivalists of the 1960s drew from the past as well, but took pains to update the music to the times: The mere fact that Dylan wrote new songs in this old style was revolutionary, alienating an older generation of folkie purists.
“Occupy This Album” obviously represents a counterculture, but too many of the artists are too caught up in role playing the past, which seems like an especially boomer enterprise. Michael Moore (yes, that Michael Moore) performs the most chipper version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” imaginable, one that seems wholly unaware of the gritty realities of 2012, much less of 1964. (The less said about his skiffle version of the song, a hidden track on disc four, the better.) Perhaps the one artist who understands how to plumb history for present-day relevance is Loudon Wainwright III, whose wry “The Panic Is On” updates an 80-year-old tune originally penned by Hezekiah Jenkins (the cover originally appeared on Wainwright’s album “Ten Songs for the New Depression”). It’s an unusual artifact from the early 1930s, but there’s a sneaky observation about class disparity that sounds more disgusted and potent than anything else on the album.
Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about “Occupy This Album” is that the music is deeply conservative. There are so few moments that grab your attention or make you see the world differently. When Occupy already seems to be in danger of losing momentum, it’s hard to say whether the movement has failed to inspire these artists or the artists have failed to document the movement.
There is so much about Donna Summer that we didn’t know… and not just the cancer that took her life. Let’s start with her relationship to rock. Summer is quite understandably known as a disco singer, and quite rightly so. It was disco that made her, and she, as perhaps disco’s highest profile performer, who helped to shape the genre. But like a number of other disco artists — Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the vocal trio Labelle and Chaka Khan all come to mind — Donna Summer was also a rocker. Yes, she grew up singing gospel, but she began her professional career as a ’60s rocker. She would describe this as her Janis Joplin phase, and she did indeed sing in a group that performed at the Psychedelic Supermarket — Boston’s version of Bill Graham’s Fillmore. She then went on to play a hippie in the Munich production of the rock musical “Hair,” and sported an enormous Afro inspired in large part by her hero, the black radical activist, Angela Davis. Although the disco music that she made with producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and engineer Harold Faltermeyer provoked a fierce backlash from some aficionados of rock, this was a foursome that, as critic Dave Mash pointed out, functioned as a rock band, one in which Summer played a pivotal role as singer and songwriter. And then there is her singing. Listen to her hit “Hot Stuff,” and tell me that Summer could not sing rock.
Summer, who was strikingly beautiful, made some very steamy — some would say X-rated — music, most memorably with her first hit, 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby.” With Summer’s groans, moans and gasps powering the track, it broke new ground in its sexual explicitness. Promoted by her record company in explicitly sexual terms, and giving performances that made Tina Turner’s look tame, Summer soon found herself tagged the “Linda Lovelace of pop music.” She had seen this coming. In fact, she had not wanted to be the singer on that track, and agreed only to record the demo, and only then in a blackened studio where she sang, imagining that she was Marilyn Monroe giving herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. After producer Moroder convinced her to let him use her vocal, her record label president, seeing its bedroom potential, demanded a long-playing version that left the media debating whether the singer came 22 or 23 times. Rock critic Robert Christgau poked fun at the record with a review that consisted of three questions, “Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?” Other reviews were more disparaging. But “Love to Love You Baby,” like much of her music, put female desire front and center in a way that it wasn’t in most rock music. Indeed, Summer’s music is inseparable from second-wave feminism’s emphasis on women’s sexual empowerment.
There is so much to say about Summer, who could have been a full-fledged personality had she not been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a disco tart. I was once on a radio program with her and, believe me, she was nobody’s fool. She described the “star-making machinery” as well as anyone. After she had already became famous she told Rolling Stone that her career sometimes felt like “this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a machine… And at some point a machine breaks down.” Fame, she observed, diminished her, making her feel like nothing so much as a “commodity.” After falling into a debilitating depression and attempting suicide, she took control of her life again through Christianity.
In a way, I think one hears Summer confront her own commodification on her marvelous record “Bad Girls.” Although the music in the final, released version suggests otherwise, Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution on “Bad Girls.” Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers. “Now, you and me are just the same,” she sings. And if Summer sounds unusually exuberant as she yells out to a john, “Hey, mista, have you got a dime?” perhaps it’s because Summer understood what it meant to be made into a commodity and reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later, Summer noted that “Bad Girls” marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject. Let’s hope that in her death she inspires more writing that fully acknowledges the intelligent subjecthood of this disco diva and kick-ass rock and roller.
NEW YORK (AP) — Disco queen Donna Summer, whose pulsing anthems such as “Last Dance,” ”Love to Love You Baby” and “Bad Girls” became the soundtrack for a glittery age of sex, drugs, dance and flashy clothes, has died. She was 63.
Her family released a statement Thursday saying Summer died and that they “are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continue legacy.”
Summer gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s, and released a number of albums that have reach gold or platinum status, including the multiplatinum “Bad Girls” and “On the Radio, Volume I & II.” Her No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits include “Hot Stuff” and “MacArthur Park.”
Her sound was a mix of genres, and helped her earn Grammy Awards in the dance, rock, R&B and inspirational categories.
She released her last album, “Crayons,” in 2008. She also performed on “American Idol” that year with its top female contestants.
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
