RS: I have to ask this, how do you respond to the morons who call you a sell-out for licensing your music for commercials?
Moby: I respond in a few different ways. First off, they might be right. Just because I've done something doesn't mean that I'm convinced that I've done the right thing. But my feeling when I license music is that if I make a record and I'm proud of it, I want people to hear it - so I have to avail myself to sort of untraditional means to get people to hear my music. One strange thing to me is that people will get upset with me for licensing my music to advertisements, but yet we all buy products that are advertised. What I find a little bit strange is when a journalist who writes for a magazine that gets most of its money from ad revenue, will then criticize me for licensing my music to advertising.
RS: Well, going in that direction, I personally think most critics suck right now. Do you read your own press when people write about you?
Moby: At this point, honestly I don't because it seems to arbitrary. When people review my records, half the time they're not even listening to the music. There are a lot of journalists out there who, for whatever reason, just don't like me. There was a review of Hotel in The New York Times which wasn't even about the music, it was just a really vitriolic attack against me. I'd rather spend my time making dinner with my friends and working on music than reading opinions of people who hate my guts.
RS: Do you think it's related at all to this whole notion that dance music needs to be underground and when someone is more successful we have to tear them down?
Moby: I don't know where it comes from. To be honest with you, if you're around for long enough and you have a degree of success, at some point the critics are going to hate you, it's just kind of how it works unless you're Radiohead. I just feel like I have to keep going. I make music and try not to worry too much about what the critics say and hope that the people I care about like the music that I make.
RS: Awesome. Is there a single record that made you fall in love with dance music?
Moby: Let me think. I could think of like three or four. The first would probably be Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." I remember hearing that on the radio in the 70s and just being amazed by it. Then what made me fall in love with house music was the Todd Terry record "A Day in the Life." Probably the record that made me fall in love with rave culture was Bizarre Inc's "Playing With Knives." Then a fourth one would be "Strings of Life" by Derrick May. Those four would be the records that either made me fall in love with dance music or cemented my love for dance music.
RS: Coming back to Bizarre Inc, do you miss those old-school rave days?
Moby: Oh absolutely. Playing big, happy, euphoric techno to ten thousand people who are all smiling and throwing their hands in the air and dancing like crazy, who wouldn't miss that?
