"It's over, nobody listens to techno!" – Eminem Vs. Moby

i prefer crackground music

Listening to any Moby produced after 1994 is a bad idea.

I had my first edibles last year while listening to Moby's recent Lost Ambients and highly recommend the two together.

er, make that Long Ambients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxzXcJKIFoM

Listening to any Moby produced after 1994 is a bad idea.

― brotherlovesdub, Thursday, November 1, 2018 3:28 PM

we are all made of blahs

Play is so good and even some of the B-sides jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A2V9Bu80J4

god that is so fuckin bad

the other thing taht sucks about play is that it ruined some of those lomax recordings for me

I tried to find the techno track that sampled the "nobody listens to techno" line, either the one I found was a different track or it's much worse than I remembered.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, November 1, 2018 2:44 PM (six hours ago)

The good one is Size Triple D (=Danny Howell & Deep Dish) Techno.

https://www.discogs.com/Size-Triple-D-Techno/release/154120

It’s too long and way overplayed at the time, but it’s a banger.

Also cool that Tim F upthread reps the Move EP, I got that at the time and was floored, I thought the guy was just a Twin Peaks theme looping one hit wonder hack from a few years back, and I immediately started seeking out all his other stuff. None of it was nearly as good, and it turned out he really was a hack. His ambient stuff I rate though, simple but effective.

Eminem though, fuck he’s really gone to extraordinary lengths to paint himself as a total asshat, going through the whole effort of writing a whole album just to bitch about how critics didn’t like his previous (shit) one is beyond parody for 2018 Eminem.

Long Ambients is good but unremarkable imo

I hate this thread for getting Without Me stuck in my head when I see the title, a song that I haven't thought about in so many years.

the other thing taht sucks about play is that it ruined some of those lomax recordings for me

― marcos, Thursday, November 1, 2018 8:08 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suddenly remembered the talk on an older thread about how Moby got the samples from a copy of Sounds of the South which he'd borrowed from a friend and never given back, what a cheap move, kind of wish I'd voted for Eminem now.

see that podcast I posted above, it's pretty great

Oh cool, thanks - bookmarked it!

Good thread premise. I don't have much to add, though, as my feelings towards both have always been fairly neutral.

why aren't there any techno/ambient diss tracks

Skit Ambients 1

Y Tu Mambients

without me still slaps

Yeah I'm not much of an MM fan, but I gotta say I do like that single.

"Stan" felt huge at the time but in hindsight feels kinda gross, albeit a good song.

I suppose I could say the same for "Porcelain."

I also love how SPIN put "Play" at a ridiculously high placing in their "top albums of the '90s" list less than a month after its release.

Play is so good and even some of the B-sides jam

I agree with this. Pulled out the two-disc set this week, which inspired the poll. Say what you want, but I think it holds up extremely well.

"We Are All Made Of Stars" is just the recycled chord progression from "Help Me To Believe," right down to the one-chord "verse"

loool

what have we done...

https://tvweb.com/the-tom-green-show-revival-new-network-details/

I always love it when Porcelain comes on in my yoga class, it helps me focus on and then release all this strife I have internalized concerning the validity of techno

http://moby.com/news/vote-for-moby-on-trl/

Today, we are trying to put together a real push to get “”South Side”” on TRL. Please help us try to put just one more boy band into retirement for the sake of good music.

Vote for Moby by calling 1-800-DIAL-MTV between 3 and 3:30pm EST or by sending your votes by going to mtv.com’s TRL page.

moby and eminem basically had the same stance about pop culture relevance but eminem had more of a sense of humor about it

I’ll take Max Martin’s worst over south side for the sake of good music.

https://webmshare.com/play/5B5MK

I feel like Eminem would be vindicated in retrospect if he'd said nobody listens to "electronica"

I suddenly remembered the talk on an older thread about how Moby got the samples from a copy of Sounds of the South which he'd borrowed from a friend and never given back, what a cheap move, kind of wish I'd voted for Eminem now.

― Gavin, Leeds, Thursday, November 1, 2018 4:45 PM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lmao

I still find it funny that Eminem, who made Detroit a major part of his image, wrote a lyric that claimed nobody listened to techno described Moby as techno.

Eminem also made ignorance a big part of his brand.

yeah, the reason I found it funny was that Eminem clearly didn't give a fuck what kind of music Moby actually made

It was even more ironic that just around that time 'proper' techno was just having its huge resurgence.

I’m on the fence on this one. Neither of them seem like people I would like to hang out with, but I decidedly dislike Moby more as a person.

However I’m being unfair since I don’t know them at all in person and that’s just based on perceptions about them...
closest thing I can compare them to is their fans... Eminem fans from back then in the late 90s/early 00s felt decidedly worse than Moby fans... although come to think about it I don’t think I even know any Moby fans in real life. Moby’s greatest fans seemed to be corporations who were selling their shit to the beat of his music. If that’s the case then Moby fans are worse than Eminem’s.

At one point I believe it was the album with the most licensed songs in history, it might as well still be. Some of them got licensed for several products at the same time. I swear “Porcelain” was used in at least four different ads that year.

And yet the question is not about the artists or their fans, it’s about their music. I have no idea tbh, they both feel uncool and overplayed as hell to me. Still it’s evident that Eminem is on another level and can be considered a zeitgeist-y, timeless artist in a way that Moby just isn’t. I guess he can always boast about being the biggest sellout in the music business.

yeah, the reason I found it funny was that Eminem clearly didn't give a fuck what kind of music Moby actually made

Exactly, that’s why it’s a great line; he doesn’t even give Moby the respect of referring to his music “properly” (or w/e).

Moby’s greatest fans seemed to be corporations who were selling their shit to the beat of his music. If that’s the case then Moby fans are worse than Eminem’s.

In terms of flops, Animal Rights made Metal Machine Music look like 21. It made Last Action Hero look like Avatar. A "bold experiment" (also known as a "big flop"), it was a) about animal rights, and b) featured a darker, more guitar-driven industrial-techno sound that seems to have wiped out his entire fanbase just as surely as if he'd given them a Zyklon-B power-shower. From big halls, he is now back to playing to about 50 people a night on tours he's having to finance himself. Somehow, he has ended up opening for Soundgarden, an experience that has chiefly involved "getting shit thrown at me every night". Things are so bad that he is toying with just packing it in, music-wise. Go back to school. Reboot. He is actively scanning brochures of architecture colleges.

https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/rzv7dx/moby

Going by this article things were not going too smoothly and even Play had dissapointing sales before it ocurred to his managers to license the shit out of it. If he was someone in the scene prior to Animal Rights most of his original fans had jumped ship by the time Play was released. They surely weren’t buying his music.

If you look at it in sales terms, in terms of exposure, of mass-cultural impact, and combine this with what the LP offers purely as a cultural artefact, I think you could make a very good case for Play being the defining record of an era. Those, sampled, disembodied, soulful voices are in the nature of battle-scars inflicted by the eternal struggle to find ways of making life bearable even when all available evidence suggests it’s a futile exercise. Repatriated to their new setting, they seem to point out how only the surface changes, but how social life, social stratification stay the same; perpetuating a society where the existence of winner taking all creates losers who must pay for survival by selling body and soul. That this mirrors the way in which the songs on Play were farmed out to any number of uses, after which the LP itself grew into a mass phenomenon, in no way diminishes its defining nature. Quite the contrary, it enables Play to encapsulate the nature of the times, emphasizing the closure of the spaces between selling out and selling nothing, between embracing the vacuous world of money for its own sake and resisting a world which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

To the extent that Play tries to reanimate these spaces, it is a worthwhile listen, but the way that promise was then denied has been instrumental in the process whereby all the gaps where interesting things happen have been mostly blocked off. It therefore marks another defining moment; that at which bands began to self-consciously make music that can be put to any number of other uses – so much of today’s music sounds like it was written to sell soft drinks or high street fashion or provide the soundtrack to that bit in the middle of the dramatic climax in Grey’s Anatomy that it ends up with no substance of its own, no spine. And this is a problem with the tracks on Play. Any piece of music that can be all things to all organizations can never be special, because whatever meaning it may hold to the listener is inevitably corrupted by the dozen other uses that adulterate that meaning.

And it is precisely because Play is such a composite fin-de-millénaire artefact, it cannot be endorsed wholeheartedly. Just mirroring the zeitgeist is not enough. The profound sense of disconnection, the LP’s willingness to be moulded to any use, renders it ineffectual. It all too easily becomes a perpetual state of ambivalence with a sprinkling of good intentions. As a collection of songs stripped of their subsequent associations, the internal contradictions on show make things interesting and invite repeated listening. Unfortunately, what Play has become is the perfect muzak for any location designed to be a space unto itself.

^Not my writing, this is Mark Beal but I agree with this point.

I'm not really buying that - downtempo electronic/chill out music with a nostalgia vibe, sampled old tunes, retro sound etc was big before Play (the whole triphop boom) and big after Play (Chillwave, M83, Schnauss, Vaporwave), even to this day (The Caretaker, all the lethargic indie covers of old hits).

When that A$AP Rocky song that sampled Porcelain came out, my friends and I discussed how it now seems weird in retrospect that no major rapper fucked with Moby at all between like...when Eminem dissed him on Without Me and the A$AP Rocky song, especially given how easily most of his tunes could turn into great beats to be rapped over. We theorised that rap's entire avoidance of Moby came from that single Eminem diss, and that Rocky sampling Moby was a definitive signal that no one truly gave a fuck about what Eminem thought anymore.

"honey" would be a really cool track for someone to rap over imo

honestly i can't begrudge a professional musician licensing the shit out of their music if they want to, even if i admire holdouts who don't. it's his art, who gives a shit?

Moby pre-Play made some genuine rave bangers. I still love and regularly listen to Go and Feeling So Real.

As much as I still have time for some of Moby's work up to and including Play, I had to vote for Eminem just simply on the strength of The Marshall Mathers LP alone.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.