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Moby (Music)

 Moby (Music)
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 Moby (Music)
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 Richard Melville Hall (born September 11, 1965), better known as Mobynote Derived from Moby-Dick, as he has claimed to be the great-great-great-nephew of the novel's author Herman Melville. Moby was also reportedly a nickname given to him by his father three days after he was born, as his parents believed Richard was too long a name to call a newborn, is an American musician, producer, and singer-songwriter. One of the most influential artists of modern electronic music, he's known for his strikingly diverse body of work, often characterized by touching synth orchestrations and heavy sampling of vintage folk, blues and gospel music.While he began as a Punk Rock musician in the early 1980s, Moby transitioned to electronic music in the latter half of the decade. He carved out a niche for himself in the techno scene of the early '90s (mainly off the success of his hit single "Go") before his first widespread breakthrough came in 1995 with his third album Everything Is Wrong, earning him acclaim and spots on big American tours like Lollapalooza while also exhibiting an impressive scope of genre influences that proved there was more to his musical identity than a four-on-the-floor beat.A year later, due to his frustration with the dying rave scene, the general public's dismissal of techno, and life in general, Moby attempted to return to his punk roots and tailor himself to the then-thriving alternative rock scene with the album Animal Rights. It was a massive critical and commercial disappointment, heavily alienating his accumulated fanbase, turning him into a music media laughingstock, and pretty much single-handedly undoing all of the success he'd earned up to that point. (Ironically, this was right around the time other electronic acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers were achieving more mainstream success themselves. Meanwhile, the album's reputation would slowly improve in the ensuing decades.)After a three-year downward spiral of alcoholism, he released what he assumed would be his last album, Play, a record based around the then-novel idea of building breakbeat and downtempo songs around samples of field recordings of blues, folk and roots songs (similar to contemporaries DJ Shadow and Thievery Corporation). Though critics and audiences were still too busy laughing at him for Animal Rights to take notice at the time, the album eventually became a massive success, making history for being the first (and possibly only) album to have every single song be licensed for use in television, films and commercials, with some songs being licensed multiple times outside of America, and eventually becoming the highest-selling electronica album of all time with over 12 million copies sold. What everyone had assumed would be Moby's Swan Song (including Moby himself) ended up propelling him to rockstar status.Moby's follow-up album, 2002's 18, was the beginning of the second phase of his career. Eschewing the genre-defiant eclecticism of his previous body of work, he began focusing almost entirely on making downtempo/chillout music based around samples of existing guitar-based recordings. While 18 was mainly taken as a retread of Play, other albums saw experimentation with guitars and pop songcraft (Hotel), dance music (Last Night) and ambient music (Long Ambients).In 2016, Moby briefly changed direction again with a pair of energetic electronic rock albums, These Systems are Failing and More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse, largely informed by the cultural and political climate of America at the time. The albums were surprisingly well-received — two decades after Animal Rights, Moby finally got some decent reviews for his rock music.That same year, he published his first memoir, Porcelain, which covered his early life up to just before the release of Play. A second memoir covering the post-Play years, Then It Fell Apart, was released in 2019.Nowadays, Moby is more of a cult figure than the major player he once was, but his legacy as an innovator in electronic music and respect as a songwriter has earned him the license to more or less do whatever he wants.Prior to Play, Moby had previously broken a Guinness World Record for the fastest tempo in beats-per-minute of any released single with his 1993 song "Thousand" (which tops out at 1,015 BPM). Other notable songs of his include "Extreme Ways," the (un)official theme song to The Bourne Series, and his only US hit, "South Side," a duet with Gwen Stefani.note The version of the song included on Play has Stefani removed since Moby couldn't produce an adequate mix with her vocals; she was restored for the song's single release.Moby's early 2000s criticisms of a controversial hip-hop artist led to him making a few unfortunate appearances in Eminem's Slim Shady mythology. Tropes about getting stomped, hitting a man with glasses and the number of people who listen to techno belong on Eminem — Beefs.
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