Play (Moby album)

Background

The second half of the 1990s saw Moby in career turmoil after years of being a successful techno wunderkind. The release in 1996 of Animal Rights, a dark, eclectic, guitar-fueled record built around the punk and metal records that he loved as a teenager, proved a critical and commercial disaster that left him considering quitting music altogether and going back to school to study architecture. 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 Terence 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."

The recording of its follow up, Play, took place during 1998 in Moby's Mott Street home studio in Manhattan, New York. At the time, Moby planned on making the album his last before ending his career. When he finished recording, 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. According to manager Eric Härle in an interview with HitQuarters, their original goal was to sell 250,000 copies, which was what Everything Is Wrong, Moby's biggest-selling album at the time, had sold.

Composition

According to Spin magazine's Will Hermes, Play was "the high-water mark for populist electronica" and a "millennial roots and blues masterwork", while John Bush from AllMusic said it balanced Moby's early electronica sound with "the breakbeat techno evolution of the '90s". 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. Moby was introduced to this collection through a childhood friend who loaned the CDs to him. Most of the samples were 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."

Release and promotion

When Play was released on May 17, 1999, it underperformed commercially at first. 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 CDs. Maybe forty people came."

First sales of Play were poor. In the UK, it debuted at number 33 on the UK Albums Chart 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 number one 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 number one 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 number one 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."

Play has sold over 12 million copies worldwide. Despite reaching only number 38 on the Billboard 200, over two million copies were sold in the U.S., with the album enjoying steady sales for months and constant popularity. In the UK, Play reached number one on April 15, 2000 (spending five weeks at the top) in the wake of the success of the "Natural Blues" single. It remained high in the charts during the rest of the year, particularly supported by 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 the lists, it became the fifth best-selling album of 2000 in the UK.

Play found its major strengths on the support of its impressive string of nine hit singles, an unprecedented feat for an electronica album. Seven of those singles were UK top 40 hits – "Honey", the first single, was already in the market in August 1998, nearly ten months before the release of the actual album. The final single choice was "Find My Baby", which appeared on some national charts three and a half years after. One of the most notable aspects of the singles releases is that some of the strongest titles were released late ("Porcelain", for example, was the sixth single from the album, released over a year after Play), on the way of securing a steady 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 the dance music scene, 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). In many ways this album helped to establish Moby as a mainstream musician. His later albums have been more downtempo-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 rarely sang.

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 ("Bodyrock" received three music videos, and "Natural Blues" and "Porcelain" received two). 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").

Licensing of songs

Play was the first album ever to have all of its tracks licensed for use in films, television shows, or commercials and this proved a major contributor to the album's success. This is a feat that has been accomplished by only three other artists; Celldweller, Meiko, and The Crystal Method. 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.

According to his manager Eric Härle, although many people believed the songs were pitched for advertisements as part of the marketing campaign for an album that didn't fit with mainstream radio, the licensing actually came as a result of agencies asking for permission to use the music as soundbeds. Härle told HitQuarters that the music was so popular because it is evocative and emotional. Despite the heavy licensing, the advertisements selected were nevertheless carefully chosen and more requests were turned down than accepted.

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."

Among the films which have used music tracks from the album are Danny Boyle's The Beach, Gone in 60 Seconds and Swing Vote, which featured the B-side "Flower", which sampled "Green Sally Up", a children's playground song sung by vocalists Mattie Garder, Mary Gardner and Jesse Lee Pratcher, from the 1961 album Sounds of the South (re-released in 1993). The television show The X-Files featured the track "My Weakness" in the opening and closing scenes of the seventh season episode "Closure", and the track "The Sky is Broken" in the seventh season episode "all things".

In addition, Stanton Welch choreographed a ballet piece using several tracks from the album including "Porcelain", "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad", "Rushing", "Run On", "Guitar Flute and String", "My Weakness", "Honey", and "Natural Blues". Initially, it was created for BalletMet Columbus in 2004 and then premiered for the Houston Ballet in 2006. Play was a great success recognized by both The New York Times and The Columbus Dispatch.

Critical reception

Play received widespread acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 84, based on 20 reviews. In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said the album's sampled recordings would not "shout anywhere near as loud and clear" without Moby's "ministrations—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." He deemed the album "no more focused" than Moby's previous "brilliant messes" but still "one of those records whose drive to beauty should move anybody who just likes, well, music itself." AllMusic's John Bush felt Play showed Moby "balancing his sublime early sound with the breakbeat techno evolution of the '90s". Barry Walters from Rolling Stone said "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." David Browne, writing in Entertainment Weekly, said despite some needed editing, Moby's graceful soundscapes filter out the original recordings' antiquated sound and "make the singers' heartache and hope seem fresh again." In a mixed review, Pitchfork critic Brent DiCrescenzo believed the "raw magnetism" of the sampled recordings was lost to "innate digital recording techniques", resulting in music that was "fun and functional, yet disposable."

At the end of 1999, Play was voted the year's best album in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published in The Village Voice. Christgau, the poll's supervisor, ranked it second best on his own year-end list. Since then, it has frequently been named one of the greatest albums of all-time; according to Acclaimed Music, it is the 316th most ranked record on critics' all-time lists. NPR named Play one of the 300 most important American records of the 20th century, as determined by the network's news and cultural programming staff, prominent critics, and scholars. It was also ranked number 341 on Rolling Stone's 2003 and 2012 lists of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and in 2005, a panel of recording industry pundits assembled by Channel 4 voted Play the 63rd best album ever. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Legacy

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." In a retrospective piece for Wondering Sound, Robert Christgau wrote:

Although some techno futurists still disparage the gorgeous Play, it qualified as a futurist work simply by redefining the concept of "commercial." Clubs would never take a CD mega, and no way could these anonymously sung tracks crack any hit-based radio format. So Moby's handlers swamped the mass market through the side door, placing swatches of all 18 songs (most many times) on movie and TV soundtracks and in ads for the likes of Volkswagen, Baileys Irish Cream and American Express. FM exposure followed. But the main reason this album will sound familiar the way Beethoven's Ninth does to a classical ignoramus is that little bits of it have seeped into most Americans brains. For this be grateful, because those bits are intensely pleasurable as melody or texture or sometimes beat, and because Moby has ordered, paced, and segued them and their intimate surroundings into something that suggests a surging and receding whole. A Treacherous Three rap powers "Bodyrock," but most of the identifiable sources are little-known blues and gospel singers first archived by folklorist Alan Lomax. Folk purists might will claim this re-use cheapens them. But here's betting musical folk like the singers themselves are plenty proud somewhere.

Furthermore, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Grammy-winning singer Adele stated that Play was a major influence for her 2015 album 25, stating:

"There's something that I find really holy about that Play album...The way it makes me feel. Even though there's nothing holy or preachy about it. There's just something about it - maybe the gospel samples. But it makes me feel alive, that album, still. And I remember my mum having that record."

Track listing

Personnel

Credits for Play adapted from album liner notes.

Play: The B Sides

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 number 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.

Moby explains: "The B Sides is a collection of songs that weren't quite appropriate for Play, but that I still love enough to release as B-sides. Some of these songs might not be instantly accessible, but I (immodestly) think they are all quite special." A few of the album's songs are somewhat similar to the ones found in Play, but the tracks were criticized as inferior by AllMusic's John Bush, who gave the release three out of five stars. Moby realized this and even admitted that if not for the overwhelming success of Play, the songs would not have been given a wide release. Neva Chonin from Rolling Stone gave it three-and-a-half stars and said it was "more of a meditative tone poem" than the "millennial time signature" that was Play.

B-sides not featured on the album:

Play: The DVD

A DVD titled Play: The 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). Moby: PlaytheDVD was released in July 2001. Produced by Moby and Jeff Rogers (Swell), the DVD was nominated for a 2002 Grammy Award. The DVD included various sections: "Live on TV", most of the music videos from the album (excluding "South Side" with Gwen Stefani), "Give An Idiot a Camcorder" (Moby was given a camcorder and the tape was later edited by Tara Bethune-Leamen), and an 88-minute "Mega Mix" of all the remixes created for the album. The "Mega Mix" was accompanied by visuals created in Toronto at Crush, led by director Kathi Prosser.