“No matter where I lived, I was still an insecure, anxious little weirdo”: Moby says money from Play success did little to change his personality
“So I was quickly disabused of the idea that buying a giant house was going to fix any of my problems.”
Image: David Wolff – Patrick / Getty Images
Electronic music legend Richard Melville Hall aka Moby has reflected on the unexpected success of his breakthrough album Play and the effects (or lack thereof) of all that money on his personality.
With the release of Play in 1999, Moby’s life was forever changed — along with the public’s consciousness of a genre referred to at the time as “electronica”. Despite its slow commercial start, Play would go on to become the biggest-selling electronica album of all time, with over 12 million copies sold globally, and all 18 tracks licensed for commercial use.
Asked about how the windfall from the record had changed things for him at the time, Moby tells Billboard: “When I started licensing music and making money from it — and it’s tricky because it might sound self-serving or even self-aggrandising — the deal I made with myself was, ‘Make money so you can do something good with the money.’”
“So It seemed creepy to draw too much attention to that, so I’m very hesitant to mention it. But my idea was, ‘if I have money, I can try and use it to a good effect.’”
The musician credits his upbringing for his relationship with money, having grown up in “in the world of hardcore punk rock in and around New York in the early ’80s”, where one of his favourite bands, “like everybody’s”, was Minor Threat.
“One of my musical and spiritual heroes was Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat who famously would only charge $5 for a show,” he explains. “As you know, the straight edge punk rock scene of the early ’80s was aggressively non-capitalistic.”
That said, Moby concedes that there were some “very selfish, stupid things” that he’d spent money on, though he soon realised that “no matter where I lived, I was still an insecure, anxious little weirdo.”
“So I was quickly disabused of the idea that buying a giant house was going to fix any of my problems,” he says. “Rather, I said, okay, I’ve made some money. Let me figure out how to live a comfortable, simple, life then ideally use the money to sort of move the needle away from this current, terrible status quo, this current terrible system regarding food production, environmental destruction, attacks on democracy, voter suppression. In my way, I’ve been trying to stay true to that.”
