Play is the fifth studio album by the music artist Moby, released on May 17, 1999 on V2 Records. While some of Moby's earlier work garnered critical and commercial success within the electronic dance music scene, Play was his first true pop success. The album introduced Moby to a worldwide mainstream audience, not only through a large number of hit singles (that helped the album to dominate worldwide charts during over two years), but also through unprecedented licensing of his music in films, television and commercial advertisements. It eventually became the biggest-selling album of its genre , with over 10 million copies sold worldwide. According to Rolling Stone, "Play wasn't the first album to make a rock star out of an insular techno nerdnik, but it was the first to make one a pop sensation. (...) Play made post-modernism cuddly, slowly but surely striking a chord with critics and record-buyers alike." [1]
One of the notable aspects of Play, as opposed to other electronic albums of the time, was the way in which it combined old gospel and folk music rhythms with modern house sensibilities. Moby sampled heavily from the collected field recordings of Alan Lomax in songs such as "Honey," "Find My Baby," and "Natural Blues," while the track "Run On" was inspired by the traditional "God's Gonna Cut You Down." The album also has more purely electronic tracks, as well as the rock-influenced single "South Side" and the more ambient "Porcelain."
Background
During the second half of the Nineties, Moby spent artistically troubled times. After years of being a techno wunderkind, he released Animal Rights in 1996, a dark, eclectic, guitar-fueled record built around the punk and metal records that he loved as a teenager. It was a critical and commercial disaster that left him considering quitting music altogether and going back to school to study architecture, according to Rolling Stone. He explained: "I was opening for Soundgarden and getting shit thrown at me every night onstage. I did my own tour and was playing to roughly fifty people a night." However, he claimed, "I got one piece of fan mail from Terrence Trent D'Arby and I got a phone call from Axl Rose saying he was listening to Animal Rights on repeat. Bono told me he loved Animal Rights. So if you're gonna have three pieces of fan mail, that's the fan mail to get." [1]
When he finally recorded its follow-up, Play, there was no sign that the album would perform any differently than Animal Rights. According to Moby, he shopped the record to every major label (from Warner Bros. to Sony to RCA) and was rejected every time. After V2 finally picked it up, his publicist sent the record to journalists, and many of them made a huge production of saying they weren't even going to listen to it. Released in May 17, 1999, Play received some good reviews, but underperformed commercially. Moby stated, "First show that I did on the tour for Play was in the basement of the Virgin Megastore in Union Square. Literally playing music while people were waiting in line buying CD's. Maybe forty people came."
Unexpected blockbuster success
First sales of the Play album were very poor. In the UK, it debuted at #33 on May 29 1999, but during the rest of the year only spent five further weeks inside the charts. It was on January 15, 2000 that the album re-entered the UK charts, slowly climbing positions and finally reaching #1 three months later. According to Moby, "almost a year after it came out in 2000 I was opening up for Bush on an MTV Campus Invasion Tour. It was degrading for the most part. Their audience had less than no interest in me. February in 2000, I was in Minnesota, I was depressed and my manager called me to tell me that Play was #1 in the UK, and had beat out Santana's Supernatural. I was like, 'But the record came out 10 months ago.' That's when I knew, all of a sudden, that things were different. Then it was #1 in France, in Australia, in Germany — it just kept piling on. (...) The week Play was released, it sold, worldwide around 6,000 copies. Eleven months after Play was released, it was selling 150,000 copies a week. I was on tour constantly, drunk pretty much the entire time and it was just a blur. And then all of a sudden movie stars started coming to my concerts and I started getting invited to fancy parties and suddenly the journalists who wouldn't return my publicist's calls were talking about doing cover stories. It was a really odd phenomenon." [1]
Play is currently the best-selling electronica album of all time, with over 10 million copies sold worldwide. Despite only reaching #38 in the United States Billboard 200, over two million were sold there, with the album enjoying steady sales for months and constanting popularity. In the UK, Play reached #1 on April 15 2000 (spending five weeks at the top) in the wake of the success of the "Natural Blues" single. It kept on the chart very high for the rest of the year, supported with the huge success of its successors, "Porcelain" and "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?." Spending almost the entire year 2000 in the charts, and achieving a total of 81 weeks overall, it became the 5th best-selling album of 2000 in the UK.
Play found its major strengths on the support of its impressive string of nine singles, an unprecedented feat for an electronica album. Seven of those singles were UK Top 40 hits - "Honey," the first single, was released as early as August 1998, and the last was still on the charts three years later. One of the most notable aspects of the singles releases is that their strongest titles were released very late ("Porcelain", for example, was the sixth single from the album, released over a year after the original release of the album), on the way of securing a constant presence of the album in the charts.
The apparent result of the marketing strategy was that the album, after an unremarkable debut, stayed on the charts for several years and broke sales projections for Moby and for dance music, which was not seen to be a dominant commercial genre in the US in the 1990s (as compared with in Europe, where Moby had initially found fame). Overall, then, in many ways this album helped to establish Moby as a mainstream musician. His subsequent albums have been more pop-oriented, frequently featuring his own distinctive singing, often with female vocalists and samples similar to those on Play, as opposed to his earlier more club- or alternative-oriented records where he sang rarely.
Critical response
The album was received negatively at first, but gained praise later on. Robert Christgau praised the album giving it an A+, stating that "his grooves, his pacing, his textures, his harmonies, sometimes his tunes, and mostly his grooves, which honor not just dance music but the entire rock tradition it's part of." [2] Barry Walters from Rolling Stone gave the album 4 stars out of 5, declaring that "the ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove". For John Bush from Allmusic, Play represented "another leap back toward the electronica base that had passed him by during the mid-90's" but also represented the album that "return(ed) him to the evocative, melancholy techno that's been a specialty since his early days", and in some way found him "balancing his sublime early sound with the breakbeat techno evolution of the 90's".[3] Bush selected Play as one of his pick albums. However, the fusion of gospel and house for which the album was most widely praised, also drew some criticism for Moby's style of appropriation, with some critics claiming not enough credit was going to the original (often anonymous) musicians and performers. Others found the commercial use of songs featuring old blues samples to be in poor taste, although once the songs were licensed, Moby did not have personal control over how they were used. Moby also declares his Christian faith in the liner notes of the album, which some took as evidence that his interest in gospel samples was "in good faith" and not purely aesthetic.
Nevertheless, the album was overall a critical success. Play was voted as the best album of the year in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll. In 2003, the album was ranked number 341 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Licensing of songs
Play was the first album ever to have all of its tracks licensed for use in movies, television shows, or commercials.[4] One of the more notable commercials featured golfer Tiger Woods playing a round of golf around New York City to the tune of "Find My Baby", but countless other uses of the album's songs are documented. Moby did not individually approve each commercial use, but it is unknown what sort of financial arrangement, if any, was reached. According to Wired magazine, the songs on Play "have been sold hundreds of times... a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album was a financial success months before it reached its multi-platinum sales total."
At the time the album came out, Moby explained that he licensed the songs because it was the only way he could get the music heard. Moby's previous album Animal Rights, a foray into the alternative rock scene, had not drawn many listeners, while Moby's earlier music was known primarily to fans of dance and ambient music and had not achieved mainstream recognition in his home country of the United States.
Music videos
The album Play was also notable for producing a large number of music videos. In an impressively extensive period of three and a half years (between August 1998 and February 2002), twelve music videos were commissioned for a total of eight different singles (only "Bodyrock" received three music videos). They were produced by a large number of directors, which included Jonas Åkerlund ("Porcelain"), Roman Coppola ("Honey"), Joseph Kahn ("South Side") and David LaChapelle ("Natural Blues").
The videos were intended to show different moods and feelings of the artist, elaborating backward storylines ("Run On"), showing funny and ridiculous situations ("Bodyrock"), expressing sadness and isolation ("Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?", "Natural Blues"), and also retreating peaceful and slow pictures ("Porcelain") as well the Hollywood-stylish scene that Moby first met due to the success of the album (as it was portraited on the latest videos for Play – "South Side" and "Find My Baby").
Use of samples and additional vocals
The album was particularly notable for its extensive use of samples from the field recordings as they were collected by Alan Lomax on the 1993 Sounds of the South: A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the Mississippi Delta. Most of the samples were very short and constantly repeated throughout the songs. For example, "Honey" used a sample from Bessie Jones that consisted of a conjunction of four verses that was repeated over twenty times. In the liner notes for the album, Moby gave "special thanks to the Lomaxes and all of the archivists and music historians whose field recordings made this record possible." [5]
Samples
- "Honey" – features samples from the Bessie Jones recording "Sometimes" (1960), produced under license from Atlantic Recording Corp. by arrangement with Warner Special Products.
- "Find My Baby" – features samples from the Boy Blue recording "Joe Lee's Rock", produced under licinse from Atlantic Recording Corp by arrangement with Warner Special Poducts.
- "Bodyrock" – contains a sample of "Love Rap" (1980) as performed by Spoonie G & The Treacherous 3. Used under license from Enjoy Records, Inc. Additional Vocals by Nikki D.
- "Natural Blues" – features samples from the Vera Hall recording "Trouble So Hard" (1937), produced under license from Atlantic Recording Corp. by arrangement with Warner Specials Products.
- "Run On" – features samples from "Run On For A Long Time" (1947) by Bill Landford & The Landfordaires, used courtesy of Sony Music.
Vocals
- Moby – vocals on "Porcelain", "South Side", "Machete", "If Things Were Perfect" and "The Sky Is Broken"
- Pilar Basso – additional vocals on "Porcelain".
- Shining Light Gospel Choir – vocals on "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" (also sampled)
- Reggie Matthews – additional vocals on "If Things Were Perfect"
Issues
The package of the album was particularly memorable for include a number of short essays written by Moby, on certain topics (veganism, fundamentalism, humanitarianism) that contributed to his ideology. The following is a transcription of these essays:
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- Fundamentalism (of any kind) troubles me. The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like. In my experience I've found that most fundamentalists aren't so much attached to their professed ideologies as they are to the way in which these ideologies try to make sense of a confusing world. But the world is confusing, and just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we're still going to live in a world that's older and more complicated than we'll ever understand. So many religious and political and scientific and social systems fail in that they try to impose a rigid structure onto what is an inherently ambiguous world. I'm not suggesting that we stop trying to understand things. Trying to understand the world can be fun and, at times, helpful. But if we base our belief systems on the humble assumption that the complexities of the world are ontologically beyond our understanding, then maybe our belief systems will make more sense and end up causing less suffering.
- It horrifies me that we allow prisoners to be treated so poorly. If someone is found guilty of committing a crime then we as a society have given ourselves the right to punish them by locking them up. But we also acknowledge that even someone convicted of committing a crime retains some basic civil rights. Unfortunately our prisons (especially here in the U.S.) are places where people's basic rights are trampled on pretty much as matter of course. Prisoners shouldn't have to fear rape, abuse & murder while they're incarcerated. A civilized nation should concern itself with protecting and maintaining the rights of all of its citizens, be they prisoners or not. A prisoner should be able to pay their debt to society with ample, constitutionally guaranteed, protection from harm. And while I'm getting worked up about the rights of prisoners, let me take a minute to point out the utter absurdity of consensual crimes in a supposedly free society. How can we justify locking people up for committing actions that have no demonstrable repercussions to anyone else? If someone's actions compromise the rights or will of another individual, then fine, punish them. But if someone's actions don't affect anyone other than the person committing the actions, then what business is it of the state's? I'm specifically referring to drugs. I don't use drugs, and I think that drugs can be terribly destructive and dangerous, but I don't see how the state can arrest an adult for doing something to their own body. An enlightened state should warn its citizens about dangerous activities, but it shouldn't be allowed to lock people up for doing things to themselves. I do not want any government making decisions regarding what I can put in to or do to my body. An individual's own body is not the jurisdiction of the state. Although we may find suicide, drug use, abortion, self-mutilation, etc, abhorrent, we cannot as an enlightened society make criminals of people that want to do these things to themselves, so long as their actions don't compromise our rights. Because we find something distasteful is not justification enough for us to deem it criminal.
- Oftentimes when I meet someone they ask me why I'm a vegan (a vegan is someone who neither eats, wears, or uses animal products). Before I list the reasons why I've chosen to be a vegan let me say that I don't judge people who choose to eat meat. People make different choices for different reasons, and it is not my place to judge the choices that other people make. Just being alive is inevitably going to cause suffering. But anyway, here's why I'm a vegan. 1) I love animals, and I believe that a vegan diet causes less suffering than a diet centered around animal products. 2) Animals are sentient creatures with their own wills, and it seems wrong to force our will onto another creature just because we're able to. 3) A great deal of medical evidence points to the fact that a diet centered around animal products is terrible for you. Animal product based diets have been repeatedly proven to cause and exacerbate cancer, heart disease, obesity, impotence, diabetes, etc. 4) A vegan diet is materially more efficient than an animal product based diet. By that I mean that you can feed lots more people with grain directly than by feeding that grain to a cow and then killing the cow. In a world where people are starving it seems criminal to fatten up cows with grain that could be keeping people alive. 5) The raising of farm animals is environmentally disastrous. All of the waste from animal farming gets washed into our water supply, poisoning our drinking water and fouling our lakes, streams, and oceans. 6) Vegan food is nice to look at. Compare a plate with grains and fruits and vegetables to a plate with pigs' intestines, chicken legs, and chopped up cows' muscles. So that's pretty much why I'm a vegan. If for some reason you ever decide to become a vegetarian or a vegan, please do so carefully. Most of our conventional diets are so meat and animal product based that when we give up meat we don't know what to replace it with. Although a vegetarian or vegan diet is a million times healthier than a carnivorous diet, making the transition away from eating animals needs to be done wisely. Most health food stores and bookstores have good books that can help you to make the transition from an animal product based diet to a vegetarian or vegan diet.
- I just went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust in Manhattan and it was driven home to me that almost all of the state sponsored atrocities of the 20th century occurred with either the complicity and/or awareness of the world's governments. Before and during World War II the Allied governments tightened quotas on Jewish immigration, thus leaving most of the Jews in western and eastern Europe with nowhere to go. Whenever we're aware of a despotic regime victimizing a segment of its population, we are all to some extent responsible. We've known about atrocities as they were being carried out and done little or nothing to intervene. As compassionate citizens we need to be adamantly intolerant of regimes that openly and intentionally victimize segments of their populations. Institutional racism, prejudice, homophobia, antisemitism, and hate of any kind, are, at the risk of sounding absolutist, always intolerable. And we need to make sure that our elected representatives do their utmost to make the world an unsafe place for despots, demagogues, and all those officials who preach and carry out hate and violence.
- Speaking of those who preach hate and violence, I need to say how absolutely horrified and sickened I am by supposed Christians who promote the use of violence against abortion clinics, doctors, the federal government, and anyone else who rubs them the wrong way. As citizens of democratic nations we are bound to revere and respect the democratic process. This leaves no room for people who violently take the law into their own hands. The very idea of Christians of all people promoting violence towards anyone is mind-boggling. Some of the central tenets of the teachings of Christ are nonjudgementalism, non-violence, and humility. How can these people call themselves Christians and at the same time call for and celebrate brutal acts of violence? I love Christ, but I'm utterly dismayed at the teachings and actions of a lot of these supposed 'Christians.'
These essays are not really related to the music, so if you hate the essays you might still like the music, and if you like the essays you might still hate the music. Who knows, maybe by some bizarre twist of fate you'll like them both. —Moby, New York City, January 1999
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Track listing
- "Honey" – 3:27
- "Find My Baby" – 3:58
- "Porcelain" – 4:01
- "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" – 4:23
- "South Side"† – 3:48
- "Rushing" – 2:58
- "Bodyrock" – 3:34
- "Natural Blues" – 4:12
- "Machete" – 3:36
- "7" – 1:00
- "Run On" – 3:44
- "Down Slow" – 1:32
- "If Things Were Perfect" – 4:16
- "Everloving" – 3:24
- "Inside" – 4:46
- "Guitar Flute & String" – 2:07
- "The Sky Is Broken" – 4:16
- "My Weakness" – 3:37
Subsequent releases
In late 2000, Play was re-released as a special edition (entitled Play: The B Sides), including an extra disc of B-side tracks (that disc would be also released separately in 2004). In addition, a mix of the song "South Side", which featured a duet with No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani, was released as a single (becoming his only song to ever appear on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #14). Thanks to its music video and heavy airplay, the song helped to push the success of the album even further. Later on, Play was re-released with the single version of South Side featuring Gwen Stefani replacing the original. (Other copies had an additional CD with the newer version of the song shrink-wrapped in the same package.) The original version was re-released on the U.S. edition of Moby's Go: The Very Best of Moby compilation.
Play: The DVD
A DVD was released as a companion to the album, featuring most of the music videos of Play (except for "South Side"), a Megamix, a performance on Later... With Jools Holland, a Moby's tour diary entitled Give an Idiot a Camcorder, and a DVD-Rom component where users are able to remix two of Moby's songs. (The DVD also included a separate CD featuring the Megamix on a single track.)
Section I: Play the Videos
- "Bodyrock" (UK Auditions)
- "Honey"
- "Find My Baby"
- "Porcelain" (UK Version)
- "Natural Blues"
- "Bodyrock" (UK Version)
- "Run On"
- "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"
- "Natural Blues" (Animated Version)
- "Porcelain"
Section II: Live on Later... With Jools Holland
- "Natural Blues"
- "Porcelain"
- "Go"
- "New Dawn Fades (If We Can)"
- "Machete"
- "Hymn"
- "Everloving"
- "Porcelain" (Acoustic Version)
Section III: Moby's Megamix
- "Porcelain" (Futureshock Remix)
- "Natural Blues" (Katcha Mix)
- "Honey" (Sharam Jey's Sweet Honey Mix)
- "Bodyrock" (Olav Basoski's Da Hot Funk Da Freak Funk Remix)
- "Natural Blues" (Peace Division Dub)
- "Run On" (Dani Konig Remix)
- "South Side" (Pete Heller Park Lane Vocal)
- "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" (Katcha Remix)
- "Natural Blues" (Perfecto Remix)
- "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" (Ferry Corsten Remix)
- "Porcelain" (Torsten Stenzel's Vocal Dub Mix)
- "South Side" (Hybrid Dishing Pump Instrumental)
- "Natural Blues" (Mike D Remix)
- "Run On" (Moby's Young & Funky Mix)
- "Honey" (Moby's 118 Remix)
- "Bodyrock" (Rae & Christian Remix)
- "Run On" (Dave Clarke Remix)
- "Porcelain" (Clubbed to Death Version by Rob Dougan)
Section IV: Give an Idiot a Camcorder (a 20-minute movie "by Moby starring Moby")
Section V: Play the Computer (this section allows to use the Beatnik Player to remix two of Moby's songs.)
Album chart positions
| Year |
Chart |
Position |
| 2000 |
UK Albums Chart |
1 |
| 2000 |
Australian ARIA Albums Chart |
1 |
| 2000 |
New Zealand Albums Chart |
1 |
| 2000 |
French Albums Chart |
1 |
| 2000 |
Billboard Top Heatseekers |
1 |
| 2000 |
Norwegian Albums Chart |
2 |
| 2000 |
Italian Albums Chart |
4 |
| 2000 |
Belgian Albums Chart |
4 |
| 2000 |
Dutch Albums Chart |
5 |
| 2000 |
Mexican Albums Chart |
5 |
| 2000 |
Austrian Albums Chart |
7 |
| 2000 |
Swiss Albums Chart |
12 |
| 2000 |
Canadian Albums Chart |
13 |
| 2000 |
Sweden Albums Chart |
14 |
| 2000 |
Finnish Albums Chart |
18 |
| 2000 |
German Albums Chart |
21 |
| 2000 |
U.S. Billboard 200 |
38 |
Singles
Nine singles were released from Play:
| Single information |
"Honey"
- Released: August 3, 1998 (US)
August 31, 1998 (UK)
- Chart positions:
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"Run On"
- Released: March 29, 1999 (US)
April 26, 1999 (UK)
- Chart positions:
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"Bodyrock"
- Released: July 12, 1999 (US)
July 26, 1999 (UK)
- Chart positions:
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"Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"
- Released: October 11, 1999 (Both UK and US)
- Chart positions:
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"Natural Blues"
- Released: March 6, 2000 (Both UK and US)
- Chart positions:
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"Porcelain"
- Released: June 12, 2000 (Both UK and US)
- Chart positions:
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"Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" / "Honey"
(Remix featuring Kelis)
- Released: October 16, 2000 (UK)
- Chart positions:
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"South Side"
- Released: November 7, 2000 (US)
- Chart positions:
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"Find My Baby"
- Released: 2002
- Chart positions:
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References
External links
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Moby |
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| Studio albums |
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| as Voodoo Child |
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| Compilation albums |
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| Remix albums |
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| Singles |
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| Related articles |
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