Moby Celebrates U.S. Politics And His Career

Due to their standing on the world stage, American politics take on a heightened significance in every other country. The recent Democratic victories meant a huge ideological shift in the U.S., and few people (besides, say, Canadians) celebrated more than those somewhat high profile members of society who actively campaigned for the Republican party's downfall.

One of the more prominent members of this faction is Moby, a longtime activist who has never shied away from expressing his views on the Bush administration. A week after the mid-term elections, he was still buzzing over the results.

"It's like Christmas, mixed in with Easter, times 100," he gushes. "I was in Europe doing promotional touring, and I stayed up until 7 a.m. I was staying in a hotel in Brussels and I was drinking in the bar. The guys from the band Tool were there as well, so we all stayed up really late watching the election results come in.

"I found myself looking at the news and reading the same articles over and over again because they made me so happy. It just kept getting better. First the Democrats have taken the house, then all of a sudden Rumsfeld's resigned and the Democrats have taken the Senate. All of a sudden, overnight, it felt like the United States had become sane again. I was talking to some friends the next day, and I said that it's honestly the first time in my entire life that I felt proud of my country."

In a way, Moby's a bit of a musical politician. He's just released his first best-of, Go, which completes his contract with V2 in North America. It seems like the methodology that went into the making of the hits compilation is similar to the strategizing and maneuvering you'd just as likely see in a political campaign.

"The selection criteria was weird, because it had nothing to do with what I thought my best music was," Moby explains. "It was purely me trying to figure out, if I were a fan of mine, what would I want on this record?

"A lot of best-ofs I try to stay away from, for the sole reason that they're always trying to sneak in the songs that everyone knows shouldn't be a part of the best-of. You know, you'll buy a Rolling Stones best-of and they'll have songs from their last three albums on there. The Rolling Stones best-of should have stopped in the '70s."

That begs the question: What would be on the Moby best-of made specifically for Moby?

"The minimal and unlistenable," he says. "I've made so much weird music in my life, and for the most part no-one's heard it, but the music I like the most is the stuff most people haven't heard.

"Some of the stuff that's on Animal Rights that's very hard, and then some of the more ambient stuff that's minimal to the point of almost not being music."

Thus, Go leans heavily on Play, which made Moby a star, but was also an object of more than a little derision. The problem with a Moby best-of is that his best-selling LP hardly made it necessary.

For a few years, you couldn't turn on the television without hearing songs from Play in commercials, and almost every movie at the time featured at least a couple of cuts from the record. It was cool at first, but then it quickly became overplayed.

Being that Moby is promoting a career retrospective, this seems like the perfect time to take stock of the decision to sell the album the way he did, one that coloured pretty much every article written about the electronic artist following its over-saturation.

"In hindsight, I think the over-licensing of Play, especially in advertising, we definitely did too much of it," he admits. "I read articles in the U.K. press and the first thing they mention is that I'm the guy who licenses my music to advertising. From hindsight, I wish I hadn't done so much of it.

"Or, what smart musicians do is they license their music all over the place, they just don't do it in the western world. So if you're an incredible, trendy indie band from Canada, you don't license your music in Canada, you license it in South Korea and Japan because then you seem pure and above the commercial prey."

But mistakes and regrets aside, Moby's not dwelling on the past. He's in the midst of compiling songs for the follow-up to 2005's Hotel, which he hopes will be out next September on Mute, his label for the last 14 years everywhere except North America. He isn't hinting whether the sound of the record will be like that of Play, 18 and Hotel, or whether it will mark a directional shift in his music.

"The thing about having a home studio is that you can go into your studio and create the music you want to create. So I can go in and make punk rock songs or dance songs or minimal experimental pieces. The hard part is trying to figure out what songs are good enough to be on the record.

"I think my criteria now is less stylistic and more qualitative, you know, which songs will make the best record, not really what genre they'll be in."