QUESTIONS & ANSWERS WITH MOBY

JB: Being a kind of iconicized figure in the electronic music world, do you think that it has taken the natural evolution that people had originally envisioned, or has it surprised them?

Moby: I think that the interesting thing about electronic music is it's become such a broad and disparate genre. I mean really, if you want to define electronic music as music that's created electronically through sort of unconventional means, hip-hop is electronic music, most R&B is electronic music; drum and bass, house music, techno, trance. Bjork is an electronic artist, Massive Attack, Portishead, you know, those are all electronic artists. I think it's just interesting what a diverse genre it's become.

JB: Do you think the juxtaposition, if not marriage, of the dance and drug culture is something more perpetuated by the various media, or is it a relationship where one inherently feeds off the other?

Moby: I like electronic music, but I don't necessarily think of myself as just being a dance artist. I mean on this album, there's a lot of convention, there's a lot of acoustic guitar and drums and piano in there. So, regarding dance culture, I'm sort of involved in it, but not really. As far as speaking about the drug culture, I mean, certainly the use of drugs is quite prevalent in the dance world. Then again I'm not one to speak of it because I don't take drugs and I'm also not that heavily involved in the dance scene.

JB: As a performer and an artist, do you perceive a difference with the electronic music culture, and its influence/presence in America as opposed to the UK?

Moby: Oh yeah, I mean look at the top albums in the UK and half of them are electronic dance records. Even mine, even though mine isn't exclusively that. Electronic music is kind of like soccer, in a sense that it's huge everywhere except in the United States. In the United States soccer is not that big a deal, but you go to England and Europe and it's a huge deal. I'm not saying I'm a football fan, I'm making an analogy -- electronic dance music in Europe is huge! A band like Limp Bizkit, in Europe, couldn't get arrested. You know, they've probably sold more records in Boise, Idaho than they have in all of Europe. And stuff like Kid Rock or like country western, you know, stuff that's huge in the United States doesn't sell anything outside the United States. No one cares. And in most cases I don't think they should care. A lot of it's really worthless.

JB: Not a big Kid Rock fan?

Moby: Actually I like Kid Rock, but a lot of the other rap-metal stuff leaves me kind of cold.

JB: It seems that the fusion of musical genres, such as rap-metal, really seems to be selling lately.

Moby: I mean when I was at the Grammies, I noticed this new phenomena which is country western, it seems like all the female country western artists look like porn stars.

JB: Like who?

Moby: Like the Dixie Chicks. When I was walking into the Grammies they were right behind me, and I thought they were Vivid Vixens.

JB: As you've acquired a formidable reputation as a remixer, and esteeming and imagining the eclectic spectrum of musicians you've seen, is there one performer or band, that you've always wanted to work with?

Moby: I love working with people who can sing well. So I'd love to work with, take someone like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston and remix them. You know, take a Mariah Carey song that I didn't really like and turn it into something that I do like.

JB: Any plans to work with the Dixie Chicks on a remix track?

Moby: I have never even heard their music. Half the thing is, like I look at the American charts and 90 percent of the stuff in there, I just have no idea what it is.

JB: I've managed to escape without hearing them yet as well, although a friend of mine is always threatening to force me to listen to it.

Moby: I mean, stuff like that, I don't even know. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not good, I have no idea. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and we were talking about Garth Brooks, and he's sold what, like 90 million records in his life? I don't know a single person who's even heard a Garth Brooks song. Maybe it's 'cause I live in New York, I don't know. It's just weird, there's all this music out there that I don't even know about.

JB: Do you see corporate entities, such as MTV, as a hindrance or an aid? As something like a vehicle to deliver a message to a broader spectrum, or simply trying to cash in on whatever is popular at the time?

Moby: Well, it's kind of like, if you want to come to Manhattan, at some point you have to cross a body of water, because Manhattan is an island. So it means you have to take a ferry, take a bridge or take a tunnel. So I sort of see MTV as being the body of water, you know, like it's there. Whether you like it, whether you don't like it, it doesn't really matter. So whether I see MTV as a hindrance or as a positive thing ... it's still there. It's like the weather.

JB: Given your literary heritage, your musical status, and your philosophical foundations, what do you think people would be most surprised to find out about you?

Moby: I think what people would tend to be surprised about is that I'm really a very open-minded, tolerant person. I'm not this rigid, Puritanical figure. Boy, if anything far from it.

JB: One time you said that if people actually knew the depths of your love for crummy pop songs, they'd be ashamed on your behalf.

Moby: It's changed. That was a few years ago, you know, when the Spice Girls first came out. Now I'm just so fed up with the whole world of lowest common denominator pop music.

JB: An equally compelling part of each of your releases are the essays in the liner notes. While you say that the essays are not really related to the music, do you find that the various motifs you address associate themselves with that particular album?

Moby: Well I do everything by myself. I write the songs and play the instruments and music, and write the essays, so certainly they're all related because they're all coming from one person, but I don't know if there's a specific correlation between the content of the essays and the content of the album.

JB: On "Play," your first essay on fundamentalism particularly resonated in my mind. It seems that in a world that expounds upon itself technologically, some people still feel compelled to think only in absolutes, hence justifying and rationalizing anything they don't understand into one category or the other.

Moby: I think most people are comfortable with ambiguity. I just think there are a few bad apples out there that want to see the world in very unambiguous, absolutist terms. You know, whether they're absolute Christians or absolute Muslims or absolutist culture, people, or whatever, but nonetheless, I think most people are pretty comfortable with ambiguity, even if they don't know what it is.

JB: You seem to regard the American prison system, in your second essay on "Play," with an air of disdain. Do you find it ironic that America, as a paradigm of democracy and a staple of leadership within the "civilized" Western world, denies individual rights, particularly with its prisoners?

Moby: What troubles me is the fact that most people consider themselves to be good, caring, considerate people, but deep down, everyone's a sadist. You know, it's like you ask your average person on the street what they think about the death penalty, and everyone loves the death penalty, and it's just so cruel. Cruelty and suffering is cruelty and suffering no matter who is experiencing it. Even if someone's done an awful, awful thing inflicting cruelty and suffering on them is still sadistic.