7. Moby, Porcelain
It’s embarrassing, now, to like Moby’s Play album. I didn’t realize how embarrassing it was, until my roommate came home a little while ago and caught me listening to it in the shower. I mean, I knew it was passe, something the world collectively drank too much of and then puked out and later felt queasy at the very mention of, like me and Hpnotiq*. Play was so popular that it tainted the rest of the earnest bald DJ’s career, which he had spent most of the nineties building. In Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 1995 issue, they said something like “You might think that techno is dead. And it is, except for Moby.”
But Play is a far cry from Everything Is Wrong, which bounced around from housy tracks to ambient ones to the hardcore homage All That I Need Is To Be Loved (still my favorite song of his, kinda.) Play’s made up of blues samples and charmingly sulky electronica, from when it was still okay to use the word electronica. It’s an artifact of millennial America, and a pretty interesting one, at that.
Released in 1999, it broke records when all eighteen of its songs were licensed for commercial use. Because it had eighteen songs. Not eighteen tracks, a dozen songs and an intro and an outro and two interludes and two outerludes and an unfunny skit involving a telephone; no, Play is a long-ass album, and Porcelain was its sixth single.
It’s a pretty song, but pretty in the way that Enya’s soundtrack for Titanic is pretty. It’s very, very calculatingly pretty. Which isn’t a bad thing, though it’s definitely a thing. The tinkly pianos, the swoopy strings, the mumblespeak of the vocals. The lyrics border on atrocious: “In my dreams I’m dying all the time/When I wake it’s kaleidoscopic mind.”
Goopy, yes, and ridiculous to sing along with–try it!–but it’s a nice reminder of that anxious millennial time when modern rock and adult contemporary weren’t that far apart. (Remember Dido? Coldplay’s first album?) You might be laughed out of the room if you ever tried to play it in front of anyone, but it’s worth another listen, anyway.
[*Luckily nobody ever talks about Hpnotiq anymore; but if you ever see it, DO NOT try mixing it with Mi Casa banana-flavored soda. DON'T.]
My heat’s back on! Yay!
Apparently there was some sort of altercation involving my roommate and my landlord’s brother, who I’ve never met in my almost five years of living here but who has flipped out on my roommate several times (ie. when he came to fix the dishwasher and started screaming because we had dirty dishes.) But that doesn’t matter, what matter is my heat’s back on! Yay! (One more time:) Yay!
In unrelated news, I don’t know how many of you like looking at tasteful pictures of straight people doing the nasty, but if you do you should check out Carnal Knowledge. I get a crapload of dirty photo blogs in my RSS feed and that and Syntheticpubes are the only two whose photos I ever actually stop to look at (as opposed to just scrolling by quickly.) Of course, both of them are meant for the heteros, which is annoying; step it up, gay people!
Oh, I almost forgot where I was going with this. So anyway, I was surprised the other day when Carnal Knowledge posted a (G-rated) picture of “three of the internet’s most talented and beautiful people.”
“But one of them is holding a Corona,” I thought. “That can’t be right. What talented and beautiful people let themselves be photographed with a Corona? That’s nasty.” And then I thought “And that middle one looks like… Wait a minute, I think it is… It’s that girl that I used to always sell snack foods to back in my dreadful retail days. She always seemed so…intriguing, yet frosty.”
And then I did four seconds of research and yes, she does seem very talented. She’s Molly Lambert, the managing director of This Recording (which is funny, because I read This Recording all the time and never noticed her picture in the sidebar before), and she has a bunch of other blogs. Her Tumblr is where the picture of the cat in a dinosaur costume came from, if you were wondering. As though I’d need a reason to repost a picture of THE MOST ADORABLE THING I’VE EVER SEEN.
