Feels So Surreal

While most of my music reading is around music I enjoy, there are a few superb books about or by artists whose work I have little or no interest in (James Young’s Nico: Songs They Never Play On The Radio, Alanna Nash’s Elvis & the Memphis Mafia, Steve Earle’s Hardcore Troubadour being three great examples). Like every other UK raver in 1990, I loved “Go” but the rest of Moby‘s oeuvré over the years has pretty much passed me by, aside from the ponderously titled “God Moving Across The Face Of The Waters,” which despite generating an instant overly-worthy-song-title red flag, I have to admit is a very pretty piece of music.

But it’s a sure sign that a music biography or memoir is a good one if you enjoy it while not particularly knowing the artist’s music, and for me, Moby’s Porcelain definitely falls into this category.

Here in the UK, many of us have an inbuilt low-level suspicion of Christianity, an instant distrust of anyone who doesn’t drink, and for some reason we’ve never really accepted vegans or veganism as a thing, so post-“Go” Moby often had something of an over-serious, po-faced and risible public image here. But in contrast, the voice behind Porcelain is smart, funny, kind, self-deprecating, observant, and can spin a decent music industry tale. And as the story unfurls it demonstrates that yes, he’s an over-thinking, naïve Christian who’s committed to the redemptive power of music, but he’s also simultaneously aware of how utterly ridiculous and shallow the music business can be.

Moby’s nighttime is inhabited by DJs, promotors, ravers, dancers, freaks, weirdos, outcasts, the homeless, junkies, club kids and bridge-and-tunnel kids, all bouncing between the velvet rope & the shabby lower levels of the city.

Porcelain is a memoir that covers a decade-long period from 1989 to ’99, when Moby went from a struggling, poor artist living in squats to the moment just before he released Play, the multi-million-selling album that really launched him into mainstream international success. The early chapters chart his fledging DJ career with accounts of the kind of gigs and after-dark adventures that were, to me as a lifelong low-to-mid-level DJ, wonderfully relatable: “I spun records in the basement of a restaurant while a few drunk women danced naked in a filthy jacuzzi…”, using his trusty skateboard to ferry his record boxes from a Balearic party at the local Ukrainian cultural centre (he didn’t know what “Balearic” was) to a sex party in a NY loft (he wasn’t too knowledgable about sex at the time either).

Parts of Porcelain form a literary record of a particular moment in New York clubbing history that to a British reader like me remains hopelessly thrilling. His story takes place in Grand Central, Union Square Park, Manhattan, Times Square, uptown, downtown, and 10th Street between 3rd and 2nd, locations that could for all I know be the most mundane and pedestrian in the world but from our grey, rainy island sound inherently romantic and exciting. Moby’s nighttime was inhabited by DJs, promotors, ravers, dancers, freaks, weirdos, outcasts, the homeless, junkies, club kids and bridge-and-tunnel kids, all bouncing between the velvet rope and the shabby hidden lower levels of the city. He writes about clubs like the Palladium, Red Zone, the Tunnel and the Limelight, where he began DJing in 1990, working for infamous murderer and, at the time, club kingpin Michael Alig, “…a debased wunderkind who looked like a cherub from Indiana.”

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Moby documents the decadence of the times from his Christian, vegan, sober, innocent-abroad perspective: “… I watched the beautiful dancer pee in a glass on the club’s mainstage and convince a very high stockbroker to drink their pee…”, and does so with Sahara-level dry wit, a matter-of-fact prose style and substantial levels of self-awareness, creating some genuinely funny moments.

He brings the same slightly bewildered naïveté to his account of the early days of the UK acid house and rave scene, where he discovered that people thought he was called “Moby Go” because of the sleeve design, and found out that not having a mic or not plugging his keyboard in didn’t matter when doing a 1990 rave PA. His surreal experience of appearing on UK pop music TV show and national institution Top of the Pops, sharing the bill with heroes New Order and also Phil Collins — who Moby recalls stared at his pre-show sound check “with annoyance and confusion” — is equally entertaining.

yes, he’s an over-thinking, naïve Christian who’s committed to the redemptive power of music, but he’s also simultaneously aware of how utterly ridiculous & shallow the music business can be.

I have the second volume of his memoirs on my shelf but haven’t felt particularly moved to tackle it, partly due to the poor reviews, but mainly because I have way less interest in DJ stories once they reach the playing-gigs-on-private-yachts-with-solid-gold-USBs-and-all-the-cocaine-they-can-eat stage. All the excess, the luxury, the glimpses of a world I’m unlikely to ever really access — it’s fun and can be interesting, but I never played a super club in Ibiza or owned a USB made of anything other than whatever the usual ones are made from, so that stuff doesn’t really resonate with me.

[ Read more from the 5 Mag Book Club. ]

Books about music industry success can be the literary equivalent of going to a zoo and viewing all the exotic creatures; removed from their natural habitat and exhibited via pages of over-excited prose, tales of excess can, much like their animal counterparts in this rapidly stretching-to-breaking point metaphor, appear lacklustre or even quietly tragic. In contrast, Porcelain is more like a stint in the smoking area of your favourite club, or a trip to a decent afterparty, where things are a little twisted but also instantly recognisable and most importantly, fun.

That the first volume of his autobiography is so readable and enjoyable is a testament to Moby’s writing and storytelling skills. He’s genuinely funny and has a sharp eye for the ridiculous, delivering his excellent anecdotes with a surprisingly charming mixture of knowingness and naïveté. Throughout Porcelain, Moby is content to make himself the butt of the joke and in doing so comes across as, and yes, it surprised me too, actually pretty cool.

Honest, authentic, touching, interesting and funny, Porcelain is up there with some of the best music memoirs.

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