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.]
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“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” You Janetophobe, you.
“It’s a pretty song, but pretty in the way that Enya’s soundtrack for Titanic is pretty.” As a lifetime Enya fan I’d like to point out she has nothing to do with Titanic. And that is a good thing.
Comment by Oliveira January 20, 2009 @ 11:01 amEnya-inspired, then.
I really thought it was her all these years…
Comment by mixtapesforhookers January 20, 2009 @ 12:33 pm