I have these thoughts that could split my head in half: Richard Hall (a.k.a. Moby)

Those of you who have been out at our recent Degenerates parties were probably pretty floored to see Moby manning the decks again. For some of you, that surprise stemmed from seeing a pop star expertly lead a sweaty mass of bodies to dancing bliss. For others, it was finally realizing a dream that they started having in the mid-90's. And for still others, it was something more along the lines of, "Jesus, I can't believe he's doing this tonight after getting that drunk just yesterday..."

It turns out Moby has been on a nightlife kick lately. And by lately, I mean the last couple of years. This kick naturally partnered with his creative side, and the result, in addition to the superb Degenerates shows, is Last Night, a dance record that will see release in March of 2008. I sat down with him to discuss Last Night, the music business, and old New York, and here's what happened...

So, let's talk about this new album first. I heard somewhere that the tracklisting was whittled down from something like 400 songs, so I guess that this has been a long time coming...
I have my studio at home so I tend to write music every day. Those 400 songs for the record I guess were written over two and a half years?

Do you stick with songs until they have a coherent shape or do you just get an idea and run with it as far as it will go, or...?
All told, I'd say that I have something like five or six thousand unreleased songs...

Wow.
But that certainly doesn't mean they're five or six thousand good songs. As far as songwriting, I go into my studio and I start writing and I don't really worry about whether anything's good or not until I want to play it for other people.

Of course.
That sort of increases the chance that I might wind up making something that I'll actually like. A lot of times when people get involved in any creative process, they start judging their output too prematurely, too early in the process. I just write and write, and, when I say 400 songs, sometimes the songs are really fully developed and are finished, and other times they're just really rough ideas.

Okay, so, then, talking about the tracks you've released on Myspace. They're both like big liberated rave-type tracks. Is that kind of meant to separate yourself from the aggressive electro stuff that's coming out these days?
The album itself is just a very eclectic dance record. There are a couple hip hop tracks on it, there are some very straightforward late 70's-sounding disco songs, there are some piano-driven rave anthems. It's a very eclectic, very all-over-the-place dance record. The last few years I've been going out way too much, and I kind of wanted the record to sound, at least from my perspective, like what it's like to go out in my neighborhood and stay out til five o'clock in the morning. So it's kind of like me trying to take a relatively crazy eight hour night and condense it into 65 minutes.

It's interesting that you think there's still an eclecticism to be found out in the clubs in New York...
I think so. Sometimes that eclecticism comes just from going out to 10 different places in one night, and sometimes it comes from being in a bar and having a DJ play a Rolling Stones song and then a Daft Punk song and then a Led Zeppelin song and then Kraftwerk. A lot of my favorite DJs, especially if they're playing much smaller places, have the freedom to play whatever they want.

Well, then, let's move from smaller ponds where a DJ can play whatever he wants to the bigger ponds. I was reading your blog a bit and happened upon the post about the American Music Awards, where you talked about how you think pop music is in a lot of trouble. Do you think that's something that's going to get better or worse? Because this has become a common theme in music writing in the last few years, where writers complain about how songs are getting more and more disposable...
Actually, because the record business is falling apart, I think things are on the verge of getting a lot better. Because for the longest time the only established way of getting music from a musician to a listener was to go through a major label and then a radio chain like Clear Channel or Liberty Media, and now in the last five years that's changed quite a lot. Now there are so many myriad ways of getting music to people. As the power of the major labels has waned and the power of the big radio stations has waned, I feel like music itself is getting a lot better. I mean there's still a lot of really crappy music out there..

Well, that's always been true though...
It also seems like music is becoming much less profitable. And my hope is that as music becomes less profitable, a lot of the music that exists purely in the interest of making lots of money will fall by the wayside.

I was also reading up this message board called velvetrope which seems to be populated mainly by music industry people, and they were wringing their hands over the fact that there are a lot of artists nowadays who can sell out a 5,000 person club but none that can fill a 15,000 person arena or a football stadium. But I think of that as being a really positive development rather than a negative one...
Yeah. I think in general music is becoming a lot more egalitarian. For the longest time, music was like the third world, where one percent was musicians who were able to sell out football stadiums and the other 99% was musicians who were struggling to sell 100 tickets. It seems now that the days of rock stars selling 10 million records and going on tour and selling out football stadiums are drawing to a close, and I think you see the rise of bands like the Arcade Fire or Interpol or TV on the Radio who are never going to sell out 15,000 person venues, but they're still going to be able make records for a long time and hopefully do really well.

It's funny, because there's this balance between there being so many more sources to get music from, but also, because of licensing and everything else, music has become so ubiquitous that you almost have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to avoid hearing between 50 and 100 songs in a given day. Do you find that you have favorite songs or sounds for certain activities, or do you just try to shut everything out when you're not specifically listening or creating music?
If I'm just home alone in my apartment, I tend to have just quiet classical music or very quiet ambient music on. Because that creates an atmosphere without being too demanding. And then, I listen to a lot of old punk rock, because that's what I grew up with in the 80's. And strangely enough, for some reason when I travel, on my iPod I tend to listen to a lot of really bad early 70's pop or old blues from the early 20th century.

Do you have a favorite sex record, or is that none of my business?
(laughs) I think it all depends. I mean, honestly, nothing worked quite as well as -- it became kind of a cliche, unfortunately, but that Massive Attack Mezzanine record. The one with "Teardrop" on it, with the giant bugs on the cover. That, and Led Zeppelin's greatest hits. You can't really go wrong with that.

Okay. Now I want to talk dance music in general. It seems like the dominant storyline this year has been European dance music, at least in terms of new presences in the American pop landscape. Do you see dance ascending to the same pop cultural position it occupies in Europe, or do you think hip hop's kind of claimed that position already?
That's one of the reasons dance music was always so popular in Europe. In the late 80's, the United States and Europe sort of went in two separate directions. The United States became much more hip hop oriented, and Europe became more about celebratory dance music. I don't know that dance music will ever have an ascendancy like it had in Europe, but it's quite interesting. I've been DJing for, my goodness, 23 years now, and in that time, the world of dance music has had so many ups and downs, and so many amazing periods and so many not so amazing periods, and to put it in a broader perspective it seems like now is a really healthy, interesting time for dance.

Is it because it's back to being fun? I was interviewing someone else earlier in the year, and he was talking about how for a long time electronic dance music tried to gain this musical cred among the rockist press, and it got too serious as a result. Like minimal became new and hot, but it was too hard to enjoy on a visceral level...
I hope so. It seems to me that dance music is at its best when it can satisfy both camps. When it becomes too cerebral and too intellectual, then it stops being fun. But if it becomes too fun, then after a while it becomes like candy. I mean, the world is vastly improved by having an abundance of throw-your-hands-in-the-air joyful dance tracks, but at the same time it's nice to have some more quiet, introspective stuff. Personally, i don't see why the two -

...should remain so separate all the time?
Yeah. I think there's room for both.

Another, semi-related topic. On your blog, you post about New York all the time, and the idea of "old New York" in particular, which is something you and James Murphy often talk about in the past tense. Do you think New York's days as a cultural incubator are over? Is it just a promo hotbed now?
You know, I know being too optimistic can be annoying, but I think the state of New York, from a creative and cultural standpoint, is fantastic right now.

Really?
It's just changed a lot. In the old days of the 70's, 80's, and even the early 90's, if you were an artist, you lived in lower Manhattan and you went out in lower Manhattan and so did all your friends. So it was like this nice, provincial, geographic concentration of creative people. And what's happened now is there's almost been this sort of diaspora of New York where everybody's moved to weird, disparate, far-flung places. But the nice thing is New York is so big that there'll always be somewhere inexpensive for a musician to live. The only downside is, you'll have like a painter living up in Inwood, and his best friend the graphic designer living in East New York, and their friend living in Red Hook. It's not like the old days where they could walk around the corner and have coffee together. So New York has become a little bit more like London or Berlin or Paris, in that it's always been a big city and only now are people starting to live in the previously uninhabited parts of it. (pauses)
I understand where a lot of people are coming from. I know about bottle service and investment bankers dressing like hipsters, and it can be a little bit dispiriting, but, I don't know. I've lived in genuinely lackluster, depressing places in New York, but even when it's depressing, it's still exciting.

Yeah! Cuz, through the sheer volume of everything, there's always enough of that one small, enervating thing to keep you afloat until life gets better again.
I've lived in the suburbs. I lived in Connecticut for a long time and there were basically two moderately hip bars in the entire state.

Good times.
And that was really only on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. If it was a Monday or a Tuesday night you were just completely out of luck. And I think sometimes, with New York, you just get kind of overwhelmed at how much stuff there is and how many people there are, and I dunno. I see things in New York being really healthy right now.

That makes this coming question seem kind of silly, but I wanna ask it anyway. You used to curate the Area:One Festival, and I was just thinking that if we eventually figure out how to reanimate the dead and stuff, and you could curate an Old New York Festival, and let's say you have two stages, who's playing?
If I had two stages. Well, I guess it would kind of make sense to have the rock stage and the dance stage. Aaand, hm. On the rock stage...who would I have...

Sorry to put you on the spot here.
The dance stage would be so much easier. Okay, we'd have a dance stage and a punk rock stage. So on the dance stage, there'd be ESG, Liquid Liquid, and, lemme think. If we could reanimate the dead maybe have Larry Levan DJing, and then have Johnny Dynell. But he's still alive. And still DJing. You could have Afrika Bambaataa. So it definitely seems like the dance stage would be pretty interesting..

And would you be playing bongos, or...?
Yeah maybe I'd just be the weird bald guy in the corner playing percussion the whole time.

Hahaha.
On the punk rock stage you'd have Bad Brains, even though they're originally from Washington, then there was a fantastic punk rock band called Kraut. then you could have the Beastie Boys come out and do a punk rock set -

Yeaaaaaah!!
...and there was this great band called the Bush Tetras who kind of fit into both camps. They made dance music but they also made punk rock. And there was this great band called Konk, who made amazing dance singles in the 80s. And, y'know, the majority of these people are still alive and kicking, so the fantasy festival you're describing could even potentially be a reality. It might be a little depressing, but it would be great.

Eh, we could just skimp on the lighting budget.
(laughs) Yeah, do it at night, lit by candles.

Oh yeah, unrelated, but I'm still curious: How did you get Grandmaster Caz on your record? Cuz the old guard of hip hop seems to be connected in its own, low-key way, and they're not really in the same pipelines that I think of you and other old members of the downtown crowd being in...So how did you go about finding him?
I bought my first hip hop record in 1982, it was "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash. And it was actually a fantastic day for buying music, I remember this really well, because I bought the first Minor Threat single, and then "The Message." So throughout the 80s I DJed a lot of hip hop clubs. There was one club in particular called Mars, and in like '88 and '89 all the rappers used to hang out there, like Big Daddy Kane, and the guys from Ultramagnetic MCs, and 3rd Bass, and Run DMC, and I always used to keep a microphone with me. So they would all come down, and they would get their bottles of champagne, and they would get drunk and start rapping over instrumental tracks.

...Wow.
There were a bunch of Caz's earlier records that got played, but there was one 12" with the 45 King that I played a lot, and so when I wrote this song, "I Love to Move in Here," for the new record, it has this like disco, early hip hop sound to it. So I wanted to get an old-school rapper on it and I always thought that Caz was arguably the most talented of all the original rappers. It was honestly just as simple as calling him up and saying, "Hey I have this track, do you want to rap on it?" and he very kindly and graciously said yes.

You're someone whose creative process is always in a high gear. But you've also been very successful, and with that comes a lot of, uh, insulation. Like, for example, I had to talk to six or seven different people and get CCed all over the place just to be able to sit down and talk with you. Does that ever impinge on your creative impulses at all? Like, do you ever have an idea and then think, "Oh man, my manager's gonna hate this." ?
That's a really good question. It is weird. It's an odd phenomenon when you have to think of all these different ways in which your actions or words might be perceived or received. Oftentimes, I just try not to care. But then, every now and then I'll say something where I'm drunk or I'm being facetious or I'm being ironic and it'll get misinterpreted. The problem with google and Lexis-Nexis is I can say something asinine and facetious and then all of a sudden, it's there, enshrined, for posterity. So suddenly you're doing an interview ten years later and someone quotes back something to you that you didn't really even mean in the first place, and it sucks. But about that insulation thing you're talking about, it plays a weirdly small part in my life. Like, I'm kind of surprised that it's even there. I've lived in the same neighborhood for a long time, and even though you went through all that stuff to do this interview, which I'm sorry about, I go out almost every night of the week, and if you'd just tracked me down we could've probably done it over a drink or something.

Oh..Is there anything you've been wanting to blurt out since this interview started?
(laughs) Lemme think...I guess, and this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, there are a lot of people who tend to be relatively pessimistic about the state of culture and creativity in New York, and I would just hope to presumptuously offer my perspective which, as I said before, is: if looked at dispassionately and objectively, I think that things in New York are surprisingly good. I mean, look past bottle service and million dollar apartments...

...and New York's still got some of the best there is.
Yeah, I mean it's still...one of the fantastic things about New York, it has this long tradition, starting with Greenwich Village in the early 20th century, and then Soho and Tribeca. It's like this: artists and musicians are always going to be willing to live in a shithole where no one else wants to live. I mean, I lived in an abandoned factory for three years, and those were probably some of the three best years of my life.

Well, that's good note to end on. Thank you so much!

Moby will be headlining the third installment of Degenerates this Thursday, December 6 at Hiro Ballroom. He will be spinning alongside Holy Ghost! (DFA), Princess Superstar (!K7), and Jacques Renault. See you there.