Strap on your fave giant silver wraparound shades–we’re Flashion Forwarding to a magical aesthetic land through which we coquettishly zip about the closets of our fave new UI-ers. Each week we pluck a recently added interview from our warehouse of current clips and try to read between the artist’s sartorial lines. Today, we’re gazing at a Moby, a bright, shining and seemingly permanent lodestar in downtown Manhattan’s increasingly peripatetic firmament.
Richard Melville Hall is a former vegan restaurateur, dedicated blogger, full-time DJ razzle-dazzler and polymath (he plays the keyboard, guitar, bass and drums). His musical style comfortably defies categorization, straddling dance, downtempo trance, git-tar strumming some atmospheric tunage and futuristic shreiks that somehow manages to sound like a beautifully tuned wail of a destitute, ship-wrecked maiden, not the howling death throes of an addled over-the-hill club-lander.
The strangest thing about Moby is how resolutely normal he appears to be. Generally opting to don downbeat gray and black ensembles that could just as easily hail from JC Penney’s as American Apparel, he resembles your favorite college Modern Lit professor or a left-wing Washington, D.C. lobbyist more than he does a genre-busting 40-something DJ. And that’s just part and parcel of the whole mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma thang that is Moby. Just when his most ardent fans prepare to rend their garments and mourn his sellout to the masses, he does something like open a café on Manhattan’s lower east side that offers 98 varieties of loose-leaf tea–in addition to accouterments for “your tea lifestyle.”
Or…launches into a diatribe against the perils of selling out (while admitting to the very human impulses even he suffers from to do just that). Because the thing is? Just like his buddy David Lynch’s work, Moby’s music will not always be loved or understood (even by his loyal fan base), but in the end, he doesn’t give a shit. It’s all about the journey to finding the beauty. Draw a cup of chamomile and join the be-hoodied, three-day-bearded wonder in thinking deep thoughts about the true meaning of life, creation and commerce below.
