If Moby is to electronic music what the BeeGees were to funk and soul in the 70s, then Last Night, his most recent release, was a fitting addition to his catalogue. It’s electronic music that everyone can enjoy, not just coked up club goers. The difference is that while Moby has also achieved pop (and cult) status with his commercialization of a traditionally underground genre, he’s always managed to somehow subvert it’s conventions at the same time. The BeeGees just made watered-down diet funk.
Last Night was supposedly inspired by a night out at the local clubs in Moby’s Lower East Side neighborhood in Manhattan. The result was a very good electronic album with pop sensibilities, oddly-coupled with some subversive undertones. Moby’s pop sensibilities caused him to throw rappers onto his first single, and his subversive sensibilities caused him to slow down the track to a marijuana tempo instead of the usual crystal meth speed. He even had the audacity to use a Zapp-esque talkbox on ‘Ooh yea’ – which, if you think about it, seems like it should be less of a rarity in electronic music.
Let’s be clear though, Last Night isn’t exactly a club album, Last Night Remixed is the epitome of a club album. What remains are ghostly samples of Moby’s original work, overshadowed by non-stop bouncing beats and electronic synths from track to track. Take General MIDI’s remix of ‘Alice’: gone are Anzyli Jones’ vocals, gone is the kick and snare beat. What MIDI re-creates instead is just another electronica dance track with some samples of the original ‘Alice’ thrown in for good measure. The majority of the disc is the same — a perversion of Moby’s subversion. The cover art for the album says it all: a smashed Last Night CD reduced to nothing more than unsalvageable splinters.
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