Moby's 'Play': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everybody, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
and more. We are your two vegans of ars Similitude,
your DJs of the deep dive, your archival recordings of
ancient recitations. That one was a stretch And I'm not vegan.

(00:29):
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Talking.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Wow you really you really tried for that one?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
You really stroke? Yeah? You know.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
I sometimes I work up the endity to use the
phrase that just came in them of an actular that eight.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Am I using that promptly? It sounds slightly obscene. Did
I leave no crumbs? I'm actually eating a cookie for breakfast.
Oh I feel really bad now. Is leaving no crumbs?
Is that an expression? Yeah? I don't know that. It's
an off branch of they ate. I ate the whole thing,
you know?

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Oh, I see, I didn't even I don't know the context.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
You gotta be on Twitter more. That's how I get
all this stuff. People say it's TikTok, but drag race
Twitter today Jordan. We are talking about one of the
highest selling and certainly most sold out records of all time,
Moby's Play, which turned twenty five this year. Of course,
I remember this record because it was everywhere. You could
not escape it. It was in stores, movies, TV shows,

(01:30):
multiple commercials. You could literally not escape it. You know.
My biggest memory of this is Natural Blues because Via
Hallward's voice is so like haunting, and he didn't really
do anything other than putting a bunch of synths around it. Anyway,
we'll get into the ethics of all this, but yeah,
I just remember that song and that video, and I

(01:52):
didn't even know what sampling really was, so I was like,
I assumed it was a live singer, you know, And
I was wrong, obviously, But I just remember being so
taken with her voice. You know. When I got to
college and started diving into like pre war blues and
folk music and particularly the work of Alan Lomax, you know,

(02:15):
that never left me. And I saw this anniversary coming up,
and not out of any particular love of the Mobster
for this album, I pitched this to you because I'm
going to backdoor it an enormous chunk of information about
celebrated folklores and ethnic musicologist Alan Lomax into the middle

(02:35):
of this episode. That's right, folks, deal with it. I'm
going to talk about Alan Lomax for a while and
completely leave the world of MOBI behind. So I don't know,
spoilers skip around. Maybe we can put time stamps in
if people don't care about Alan Lomax. But he's more

(02:56):
interesting than Moby by a damn site, I'll tell you
that much.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
I have to be honest, when you first mentioned doing
this album, I was absolutely baffled, and I actually thought
you were messing with me. I mean it was like,
you know, how about we do an episode on pure Moods,
which which we should. We probably should that. Actually that
compilation means an awful lot to a lot of people
who are dear to me, so I think that could
also do quite well. You know, in retrospect, maybe with
this should have been a pure Moods episode.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
We just had a long tangent because it isn't Porcelain
on that. I think Porcelain's are probably yeah, you know,
in fairness, Sorry, I got to finish chewing before I talk.
I heard some chewing on the other episode, and that's
so I angry with myself.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
As you're the fact that producer, I should probably give
you hands up. I'm sorry chewing grabbing the mic and
doing this as you talk typing.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, I yeah, but this is when I do when
I grab the mic. This is for effect, you know.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
No, there's a lot of where you get so excited
where you wrap the bike and do this and like
I hear the like and I try to cut herround it,
but it's like it's really like endearing.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
So I never want to tell you about it. But
one hundred and fifty two episodes, I thought, I thought,
maybe this time I'll tell him. No, I I have
to confess that, like twenty five years later, when I'm
like now that I'm into like ambient music and a
lot of minimalist stuff, I actually have to say, there's
some heaters on this album. I mean, there's a there's

(04:18):
a reason it's so damn popular. I mean, it's it's
all innocuous and fairly like I mean we'll talk about
this later, but fairly low effort musically, not in terms
of like the labor that went into it, because he
was doing all this pre computers. He was just doing
this with a bunch of samplers, but like you know,
he didn't like re harmonize these songs. He just draped

(04:39):
them in a bunch of single finger synth lines. That's
so funny that.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
You mentioned this being ubiquitous, and you know, reading your
outline and seeing all the synks that it got in
commercials and movies.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Over one hundred that's in the course of a year.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
I have almost no memory of this other than seeing
the poster for the album cover in like an fl
or Sam Goodie's or something.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
I mean, I granted I was not exactly on the
cutting edge of music in nineteen ninety nine when I
was twelve, but right, yeah, I just it's so funny.
Where would you encounter this, Like, what were your interactions
with this as a tween?

Speaker 2 (05:16):
It was all over the box, which was the pre
pre MTV too. Yeah, so I and all the videos
for this were directed by like celebrated people like David
la Chappelle and Roman Coppola. Oh wow, Oh I didn't
know that. So I saw the videos quite a bit,
particularly south Side where Gwen Stefani looks like I hate
that song. Its song is.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Dumb, But that's that's the only like because it's dumb
and I don't have sophisticated music teste.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
But Gwen Stefani is so hot that music video that
made quite an impression on me as a youngster. No,
I just uh yeah, that was like the first place,
and then like yeah through osmosis, just like like being
in the drug store and being in a Sam Goodie.
You know.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Hearing me Alan Lomack's connection for this album really put
it in perspective for me.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Why you wanted to do this?

Speaker 1 (06:07):
You know, it's interesting. I don't know if I ever
told you about this. It reminds me of this project
that I was working on a few years ago. The
gentleman who runs the dust to Digital Twitter and Instagram
account came to us at iHeart and he wanted to
do a show. And for those of you who aren't
familiar with the Dusted Digital count, it is incredible. It
is just he's a I think he's an archivist Dan

(06:30):
in Georgia and he posts these amazing clips from around
the world. People send them stuff from everywhere. You get
everything from a guy playing a McDonald strawl like a
flute so well that it makes you want to cry
to women in Africa standing in a river playing the
water surface like a drum, which is just absolutely mind blowing.
And then you've got some guy in the American South

(06:51):
playing a cigar box guitar, and then a clip of
Carla Thomas on some regional TV show in the sixties.
I mean is he just has the most fast spectrum
of music from everywhere and he's just so cool. Everyone
go check out us the Digital and he pitches a
podcast that we actually put together a pilot four which
was like a tone poem for the development of music

(07:13):
and the cross pollination of sounds across the world, and
it was pretty cool. Every episode was going to be
a different theme, Like I think the pilot we did
was the body as an instrument, and it was just
people making these incredible sounds with like hand rhythms and
whistling and I think I think bone flutes and things
like that too, which technically bodies and instrument. It was

(07:35):
really cool, but it was a little too out there
and we didn't move forward with it at the network,
which I'm very sad about. But his account is so
cool again, check it out.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, And the crazy thing about YouTube at least is
that The Lomax archive, which we'll get into, is now
part of the Library of Congress, has some tremendous video
stuff that was shot, like RL burn side, like a
very young RL burn side playing and all like shaped
note congregations singing. It's just people who are just curious

(08:06):
about music. And maybe I'm gonna get corny here, like
feel a yearning for like an older style of music
in a different world that this music was being created in.
It is just an it's like a time machine and
it's incredible. Moby though guy, Yeah, yeah, that guy sucks.

(08:30):
I I you know, it's funny because like for me,
it didn't take until like the past few years when
cultural appropriation really became a thing for me to be
like kind of weird that this annoying, little bald guy
Vegan made like an ungodly amount of money by using
a bunch of black people's voices. But yeah, obviously that

(08:51):
conversation has only got more pointed and heated. And I
will say that despite his talent, the guy hasn't done
himself any favors. Man. He keeps just popping up in
the news for saying dumb sh Yeah. It's like I yeah,
I can't get quite a handle on what is precisely
wrong with him, but maybe we'll get to it. Maybe

(09:11):
we'll get to it.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, I mean that was a conversation that we explicitly
had on the Stust the digital pilot, because he had
We played some of the field recordings and kind of
use that as a jumping off point to talk about
how you know, this music can sometimes yield unexpected results
like this movie hit.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, I mean, some of these women were born in
nineteen oh two, you know, that's like, and their parents
were slaves, and it's just incredible that you have them
singing through history in this way. And it sucks that
he made so much money from it and apparently did
not give them any or even mention them by name ever, uh,

(09:50):
and in fact misidentify some of them as we will
also get into well for Moby's tragic backstory to the
Lomaxes and the Library of Congress collect since they're responsible
for to the bizarre nature of copyright and sampling law,
illustrated by the fact that Alan Lomax has a credit
on a jay Z song to the exact whereabouts of
the CD box set loaned to Moby that jump started

(10:13):
this whole damn thing. Here's everything you didn't know about
Moby's play.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Moby was born Mobile Bumblebee in nineteen sixty five, taking
his stage name by combining the two no. No, I'm sorry,
I'm just now hearing that's wrong. His name is Richard
Melville Hall, and he took his stage name, of course,
from Herman Melville's Moby Dick. However, despite this being a
frequently repeated part of his lore that he's distantly related

(10:45):
to Herman Melville, I don't believe that that's true. There
was like a genealogy podcast or project that I found
that actually contends that he is related to David Melville,
inventor of the first United States patented first patented in
the US gaslight system. That's god of cool.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Did he He must have started the Herman Melville rumor himself.
That seems something he would do.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
I don't know. Yeah, I mean, despite his bookish demeanor
and easy listening vibes, Moby's life was kind of His
dad died in a drunken car crash three days after
he was born three days and his single mother struggled
to make ends meet and raise her son in locales
like San Francisco, where he would later recall being sexually

(11:33):
abused by a staff member at his daycare, and a
squat in Darien, Connecticut, living with, as he later told
The Guardian, three or four other drug addicted hippies with
bands playing in the basement. I mean that all sounds awful,
showing compassion.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
But Arthur squats and Darien, Connecticut, that's like, let me
tell you about That's like Greenwich, That's like Beverly Hills.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's like, I mean, every city's got poor part. I
don't know. I mean, yeah, like you're right, Like obviously
the whole Natalie Portman thing. He showed his ass.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
He plays fast and loose with this pat I think
he's I don't know. I start to wonder about his
deckenzie and upbringing.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
But within the context of that, yeah, well, young Mobile
took up music and notched some impressive creds. When he
was eighteen, he was the lead singer for SF punk
Legend's Flipper for all of two days. Sorry, I just
want to say.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
In twenty nineteen, the median household income for Darien, Connecticut
was a quarter million dollars.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Okay, well, what was it in nineteen seventy. Fine, I
love that you're already knives out for Richard.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah, this is the most aggressive I've ever gotten on
this show.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Hey, maybe you'll get some nasty Apple podcast reviews about you.
You think I would be much more on your bad energy?

Speaker 1 (12:55):
You think I would be much more lenient and a nerdy,
nebeshy dude who delves into archives.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Well, he's got that. He's got that thing that Orson
Wells famously said about Woody Allen, which is that his
meekness is actually arrogance. Oh wow, yeah, you know, I
know we've both talked about a shared history on our
couches watching the various VH one programming countdowns of the
early to mid two thousands, and I remember there's an

(13:25):
episode I think it's either there are two that are
burned in my mind. There's one hundred Greatest Artists of
Hard Rock hosted by Carmen Electrone and Leather Dress. And
there's the forty Most Shocking Moments in Rock and Roll
hosted by Mark McGrath in a leather jack in a
leather face. That didn't happen until recently. I said Simpson's

(13:48):
line when they're watching Troy McClure and the Muppets. Daddy,
why is that muppet's face made out of leather? Anyway,
there's one of them where Moby is talking about Kurt
Cobain and he uses the word in sush.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
And then he's got the chiron that brings up.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
The chiro and the definition of the words that dunk
on him. I mean, the only time.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
I've ever like intentionally washed anything with Moby being interviewed
was an episode of never Mind the Buzzcocks, which is
my beloved British music centric panel show pop Quiz, and
he was on there and he spent most of the
time just talking about how everyone hates him and just
made it like an ongoing joke about how like the
world hates it.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Oh yeah, he's he's very sensitive about that and we
are not.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
His.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
He also stated started his own punk band A Wall
around this time.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Aw Ol, not a Wall, which would be really that
would be a much more mobi name.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
That would be kind of sick punk band name. Wall. Yeah, yeah,
a wall a wool a wool. I don't know. That's
a regional accent thing. I can't shake it. He joined
the Connecticut punk band Vatican Commando for at least one EP.
So this is interesting because you have some of his
career pivots in the nineties are informed by his background

(15:08):
in hardcore.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Punk Connecticut punk band that's like Vegan Hunter, Like, come on,
I'm sorry, and I'm not trying to talk on Connecticut now.
Some of my best friends are of Connecticut. Come on,
I mean, you're a punk guy. Is there a thriving
hardcore Connecticut punk scene.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
There's a lot of hardcore that comes from the northeast,
particularly Massachusetts. I don't know how much else of it has.
Let me just look up Connecticut punk bands and just
see what we got. Hate Breed, Okay, Youth of today.
Pioneering hardcore band Vatican Commandos are listened on here Dashboard Confessional.

(15:49):
Come on, so it's a it's a slim list, We'll
just say, but they existed. Representation it matters anyway. So
he started DJing. Also, he dropped out of college in
nineteen eighty four and began djaying around Greenwich and Stamford,
blah blah blah. I moved to New York, etc. And

(16:10):
so forth. Squalor he talks a lot about hanging out
at Mars Bar which may be a familiar signpost to you.
It's where people who were already old when I moved
to Brooklyn talked about their gory days. I remember Mars bar.
His first big break was with Go, a track that,

(16:30):
in keeping with his later work, is built on someone
else's work. Its entire harmonic framework is the two chords
of Angelo bat Lamente's theme from Twin Peaks. Released in
nineteen ninety one, it peaked at number ten in the
UK in October and earned him national exposure. There he
made appearance on Top of the Pops and from there
his career kind of started, which would later be a

(16:51):
false start, but started to pick up. He collaborated on
remixes with the likes of Soundgarden and Billy Corgan. It's
hilarious that he's friends with Soundgarden. They took him onto
a or I don't know. You know, electronic music is
not really my forte, but I believe this was. You
can contextrawize a lot of this in the big rise
of I'm just gonna say electronica meaning anything based in

(17:15):
like drum machines, synths, and samples. I know that this
is a disservice to the entire world of electronic music
and all of its many, many subgenres. But I think
the quick thumbnail sketch of it in context is as follows.
You know, there's a lot of US people who have
obviously gotten written out of it, like Frankie Knuckles, and
you know a lot of a lot of black people,

(17:36):
a lot of black DJs. But in the UK, I
think you can trace it a lot too, as we
just talked about in the Joy Division episode Factory Records
and the kind of breakbeat scene that sprung up in
northern Manchester and our breakbeat probably didn't start in Manchester. See,
this was what I was worried about. Electronic music. People
are deadly serious about their sub genres and I think
I'm making a hash of it, but it was big

(17:58):
in Britain and a lot of those started to filter
over to the US. This is where you get like
the early rave scene and everybody's on M D A
or M D M A and squats and warehouses. And
I think this is most typified by that like five
years chunk of time when you had like was it
the Dust Brothers who scored Fight Club? I don't know.

(18:22):
I think the like the soundtrack for Requiem for Dream
has a bunch of like breath beats on it. Obviously
Daft Punker breaking around this time, Portous Head, Chemical Brothers,
FX Twins, YEAHFX Twin singular, but it's a lot of
like you know that sound, massive attack, massive attack, shut this.

(18:46):
I think they're more down tempo, which is also what
Moby gets looped into. But again the damn subgenres. I
have no idea anyway. So this is the context in
which Moby was ascended and things kind of proceded a
pace for him. He signed to Electra in nineteen ninety
three in the US and Mute Records in the UK,

(19:06):
and his first single move Parentheses You Make Me Feel
So Good Parentheses Closed, reached number one on the US
Billboard Hot Dance Play Chart and number twenty one in
the UK. That year, he also toured with Aphex Twin
and could not abide with mister Twin's smoking habit, so
he elected to fly to each gig instead of take

(19:27):
the tour bus, which is hilarious given how hardcore he
is about veganism and climate change, and apparently at this
point in his career was not concerned with a relative
difference in carbon emissions between a plane and a bus, which,
as you can imagine, are vast.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
The Mobster's next album, Everything Is Wrong, was released in
March nineteen ninety five. Spin magazine named it Album of
the Year, though it failed to crack the Billboard two
hundred or have an impact on the dance charts. Moby's
tour for the album included headline spots on the second
stage at the nineteen ninety five loll Palooza festival, and
it was fitted as the next big thing in the
dance electronica club. Whatever genre your words, I didn't much.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
There's down tempo, there's breakbeat, there's happy hardcore, there's there's
that different. I don't think so. But maybe who's to say, sure,
New Jack Swing is electronics? Should we make a Should
we make an electronic genre? Right now? We probably could.
Who's to stop us?

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Who's to say, who's to say piss jump? Yeah, okay,
go make some sounds right now. I can think of
his super Hans from Peep Show.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, just this is outrage, this can take this is outright. Yeah,
I mean that's dude, uk't Yeah, this is just like

(21:10):
I just think of like sallow men with bad teeth
in parcos When I think of like the UK electronic scene,
there and there go the Apple podcast.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Our new friends in the UK.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, sorry, guys.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
The La Times back in nineteen ninety five said Moby
was quote poised for greatness, and Billboard declared him King
of Techno. What an awful title, What an awful lineage.
Courtney Love approached Moby to produce her next whole album.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
But he declined and became phrasing.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
But he declined the work with Courtney Love and became
disillusioned with to his newfound fame and made his next
album a hard pivot. He called it Animal Rights, which
is hilarious, and it was a guitar driven rock record
that alienated his fans of softer ambient tracks. Biby himself
called it weird, long, self indulgent, and difficult.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Many of those words.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Apply to him by way, but for instance, the lead
single from Animal Rights was a cover of That's When
I Reached for My Revolver, named for a quote by
Nazi poet Hans Jost by cult post punk band Mission
of Burma.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, it's uh, the quote is something about it. It's
actually the song title is actually a misnomery. The actual
quote is something like, when I begin to think of
the word culture, that's when I unholster my Browning or something. Anyway, Yeah,
what do you think about that? I admire the perversity
of it.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
I'll say, sure, I mean, I see I almost It
almost seems like a lou Reed esque like will Full
driving a care into a mountain.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
He has mentioned metal machine music in some interviews about this, unsurprisingly,
but a metal machine music come out, that's a great question.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Seventy five Oh that early wow, And that's the one
where he just let his guitars feedback and went out
in empty yeah camp back, which he was not even
in the city. All right, didn't he leave?

Speaker 2 (23:22):
I don't know? Actually, yeah. That was after Sally Can't Dance,
which is his one of his worst records.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
It's like, oh, he didn't like that. How about this? Yeah,
hits guitar in front of amp.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
It was definitely in his like fallow era that it
was rock and Roll Animal, which is the live record
he cut with that guys who were later in Alice
Cooper's band. It sounds nothing like him. Kind of a
great record, though those guys are all monsters. Berlin before that,
but Baldlin, as they say, Balklin. Anyway, go on.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
After the backlash to these animal rights, he released a
compilation of his film score work and asked to be
released from his deal with Electra Records. You know you
just burned through your contract. Here's a compilation of my
film scores. Can we wrap this up please?

Speaker 2 (24:14):
I guess he like, yeah. I think he said he
was dropped, but I don't know. It doesn't nothing doesn't matter.
None of this matters.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Moby told Rolling Stone of this period, I was opening
for Sound Garden and getting thrown at me every night
on stage. However, he did get fan mail about animal
rights from Terrence Trent, Darby, Axel Rose, and Bono, which
we guess is.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
A good thing in the mid nineties, right, Apparently, he
cited it is a good sampling of favorable opinions. Sounds embarrassing. Up.
Mostly people wrote me and told me I was doing
a good job. I would seriously question my work, he added.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
I did my own tour and was playing to roughly
fifty people a night.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Oh my god, bitch, bitch, bitch.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
How many people did we played to and our worst
like two on average?

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Nine both of our girlfriends. Yeah, and the guy's in
the other band. Yeah. Sometimes sometimes a lot of the
time they did not watch us.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Sometimes if we were playing the Bowling Alley, they were rolling.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
But Moby, much like us, was not in a good place.
His mom had died of lung cancer, and he was
drinking heavily and having panic attacks before going on stage.
He initially started to work on what would become Play
with the intention that it would be his last album,
and he thought about going back to school to study
what else, architecture For some reason, that's just the way

(25:46):
that he makes these Like I think I remember hearing
Pink Floyd's later era music being described as large architectural
blocks of sounds, and that's always how I felt about
Moby's stuff in this era too.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Yeah, this is a bit of a tangent, and you
can cut it. But I've always thought of electronic music
as being built vertically rather than horizontally, because I mean,
I mean, yeah, I mean, at least in digital audio workstations,
not back in the day when he again he was
just chaining samplers together, but in digital audio workstations, it's
you know, you're just stacking different effects and different synthwashes

(26:21):
and drum layers over one thing. And it doesn't you
know the idea of it, I guess because it doesn't
change it in their loops. The idea of it is
it doesn't feel as much of a progression to me.
I have no problem with this genre. I'm not investigating it,
but I don't hate it as much as a lot
of people do. I mean, I do hate dubstep, and
I do hate the rise of like David Gueta, who

(26:42):
we will get to this later, but excuse me, David Ghetta.
I used to get stopped by people thinking I was
him of the airports. I mean that could have worked
out with you in some ways, but spoiler alert, it
did not. How do you say QUICKI in ziebachun God,

(27:04):
that guy sucks. Moby described the inspiration for play thusly.
My friend Dimitri Erlik, who is a music journalist here
in New York, got this Alan Lomax box set that
is incorrect, As we will find out later, it was
his younger brother Gregor.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
This box set was like, you know, musical touchstone for
I mean, pretty much kicked off the folk boom. I
guess we'll probably talk about this later. Yeah, in the
late fifties, early sixties. I mean Bob Dylan bass his
entire like early part of his career on this.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, I mean there are. There are a lot of
the sort of big er texts of the folk boom
or two things. One was this Alan Lomax box set
that came out via Atlantic and Prestige, which was like
a twelve LP set, and then Harry partches the Anthology
of American Folk Music, which is a little bit weirder,
some more avant garde stuff not out on Guard, but

(27:58):
just some less mainstream stuff. And yeah, I mean there
are there are actually recordings of Bob Dylan and Al
Lomax like hanging out and Bob's like playing Masters of
War for him and then they talk about it. The
stuff is all online. I mean, when you spend your
whole life recording everything around you, you amass a pretty
big archive. The box set, anyway, he said early could

(28:18):
listen to it. It wasn't that interested in it, and
he gave it to me and I heard all these
great a cappellas. The box set specifically was Sounds of
the South, a musical journey from the Georgia Sea Islands
to the Mississippi Delta. Uh. Songs of the South, I
mean yeah, Song of the South is, of course, the
famously racist Disney movie The Zippity Dooo Dot comes from
and has been completely disappeared by them because it pictures

(28:41):
the slaves as happy and singing and all these other
like you know, racist overtones. But isn't that the big
thing about it? Yeah? Yeah, everyone look up Song in
the South. Disney doesn't want you to. Lomax's work was
essentially just exploring and documenting music for parts of America
and other parts of the world as well. He was

(29:03):
just really at the er taper, let's just say. But
aside from that essential work, he is kind of a
talent agent. He and his dad were for like this
huge chunk of mid century American music. I mean they
quote unquote discovered artists like Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Pete,
Seeger burrel Ives, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters. This is

(29:25):
kind of a misnowner because obviously a lot of these
people were well known in their regions. But because of
the position with the Library of Congress and there ends
with the different radio programming, the Lomaxes really did break
these people nationally and internationally in ways that they never
would have just playing around. They never would have gotten
the chance had they just kept playing around, you know,

(29:45):
Louisiana and Texas. There are some knocks against the Lomaxes,
particularly that Alan in particular fevered recording conditions and performances
that sort of reinforced the exoticzation of the music. Like
he was a big proponent of recording outside and getting like,
you know, the sounds of nature in there, and he

(30:08):
frequently allowed them to get drunk or in fact just
got them drunk for recording sessions to kind of have
adam more authentic feel to it. So there's that, But
I still would argue that he is the most influential
academic and researcher of the twentieth century and maybe all time,

(30:30):
because you cannot the entire landscape of twentieth century music
in America and Britain, you cannot divorce it from his
work because this early stuff was coming on wax cylinders.
But then this box set in particular, as we mentioned,
later Atlantic Records bank rolled so he got like good
recording equipment. Some of these recordings still sound great and

(30:52):
when it was released, it just spread so far and wide,
and between the stuff from the Mississippi Delta region that
he got and the stuff from that, let's just say,
like the more white music that he got. Everything in
the second half of the twentieth century is influenced by that.
You know, anybody who like country rock, folk rock, obviously

(31:16):
the folk boom, but also all of rock and roll.
You don't get rock and roll without the Delta Blues.
And you don't get people in Britain hearing about the
Delta Blues and then stealing it without Alan Lomax. So
I mean, when you quantify his influence and reach in
that way, I mean, remember, the most famous researcher of

(31:39):
at least non scientific of all time, you know, and
people don't really know who he is except for nerds.
So obviously I'm quite enamored of his work. But you
were saying.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Extremely well said, especially considering most of that was off
the dome. Born in Texas in nineteen fifteen to a
concert pianist mother and a prominent musicologist father, like you mentioned,
Alan Lomax came by his interest in folk music naturally.
At age seventeen, he took a break from his studies
and joined his dad on folk song collecting field trips,

(32:14):
which we'll talk more about later for the Library of Congress.
The trip on which he discovered Huddy led Belly Ledbetter
Led Belly, absolutely iconic blues and folk figure. He'd already
lived one hell of a life by the time he
crossed passed with Alan Lomax. He was convicted of murder
in Texas in nineteen eighteen and sentenced to thirty years

(32:37):
in prison, though he wrote a song pleading for a
pardon and was granted one by Governor Pat Morris Neff
in nineteen twenty five. Okay, the whole murder thing in
the led Belly origin story kind of gets glossed over.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Do you know what?

Speaker 1 (32:54):
What did he did? A Did he actually kill someone?
Or was he fin' sure?

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Oh? Oh, I'm sure no. I mean a lot of
those guys, several of those Blues guys were murderers. Skip
James said that he shot a guy in like a
logging camp, I think at one point just to watch
him die. Possibly who else? I was just thinking of,
oh r al Burnside, who I mentioned earlier, who's like

(33:18):
Thanks to Fat Possum Records, became one of the more
visible rerediscovered Southern blues artists in the late nineties early
two thousands. He played with John Spencer Blues Explosion and
he shot a man. He mentions it on camera at
one point in this documentary. Yeah, it was a rough

(33:40):
and tumbled time. Man. You know, all of these guys
were just like kind of I mean, I've read a
lot about the Delta Blues and it's fascinating because some
of them really only had like learned a handful of songs.
I mean, they were not like jazz musicians or thought
of themselves as musicians in any particular sense. My music
was just part of such a part of the culture
that they would just pick up a couple songs that

(34:02):
they would learn from either other musicians or just by
being around them and kind of perform them either as
like party tricks or cobbled together a set and would
play that. But you know, none of this is really paid,
because all of it was for house parties. On the
different work farms or plantations that were I mean, I
guess they weren't called plantations. They were work farms after

(34:23):
the Civil War, but same difference. And yeah, I mean,
otherwise they were just like working in logging camps, or
some of them were just professional gamblers. I mean, it
was really a rough and tumble millieu. Certainly not Miles
Davis going to Juilliard, you know situation. So no, I
have no doubt that Lad Belly actually killed someone, maybe

(34:45):
more than one person.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Are there any ethical implications we should touch on with that, or.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Just guy had a common well, I mean, how much
an entire dissertation's worth. I mean, you know, this at
this point was just still reconstruction era, right, And so
the cards were heavily stacked against all these guys trying
to get off out of the sharecropping situation. And as

(35:11):
Dave Chappelle famously said, you know, you better learn how
to dance or play basketball or somehow learn how to
entertain these white folks if you want to get out
of here. But they were violent situations. Man and Angola
or Led Belly in Louisiana where Lead Belly wound up
at one point was hell on Earth. It's a famously

(35:33):
horrifying prison, and it's just it's incredibly sad. And a
lot of them, you know, as we'll touch later, were
still languishing in obscurity. I mean I didn't really touch
on in this episode, but basically, in tandem with a
lot of this stuff, there were people who were just
fans of this music who would just John Fahy is
a huge one, who would just go drive through the

(35:53):
South and ask for what we're called race records and
pick up stuff for their collections. And it was dangerous back.
I mean, they would get chased out of neighborhoods just
because Alan Lomarck got in trouble, just because he had
a giant Library of Congress seal on his van, and
people were just like, who is this white man coming
down from the government like asking about us? But yeah,

(36:16):
I mean it was a tough time. He's horrifically impoverished
and alcohol abuse everywhere, and so much of this music
that has become foundational to American history and deified in
a sort of remote way, people don't really understand how
terrible life was for a lot of these guys. So

(36:38):
you know, I bear them no grudges as far as murders.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
When the Little Max has found led Belly, he was
serving time and Louisiana's notorious and Gola Penitentiary, as you
just mentioned, they recorded him in nineteen thirty three and
nineteen thirty four, and sent the recordings to Louisiana Governor
Oscar k Allen, petitioning for led Belly's release. Some of
claim that led Belly was due to be anyway due
to good behavior, But I think this.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Put the legend in this case. Yeah, it makes a
better story. Yeah. Oh, here it is. Leed Belly shot
and killed Will Stafford in December nineteen seventeen while on
the run from the law. Will Stafford. So was he
a cop? Nope? Led Belly insulted his girlfriend Stafford Drew first. Okay, yeah,

(37:28):
classic Jesus continue.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Leed Belly ended up driving John Lomax around for three months,
helping him with his folk song collecting, before making a
go of things as a singer himself. Despite what you've
described as an astonishingly racist Life magazine article and championinged
by Native Son author Richard Wright, led Belly actually landed
in prison again in nineteen thirty nine, at which point

(37:55):
Alan Lomax took him under his wing and secured him
radio show appearances and bookings.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Imagine he got him out of prison. I believe it
was just actually released this time. But like to the
recognizance of John Lomax, whoa That life. I cannot read
the title of that life pictorial it is it uses
the hard r What sent me a link to that?
Oh yeah. One of the most the craziest details I
forgot about Lead Bellies that he was his throat was

(38:23):
almost cut. He was playing a dance and someone stuck
a knife in his neck and almost completely cut his throat.
And I forget. I remember this detail about him was
that people said it was from like a botched hanging,
but it was a knife wound. Before he started a
singing career after No, this was at at a gig actually,

(38:48):
Christ Yeah, I mean that's the thing, man. These roadhouses
were tough. I've seen roadhouse tarshak tar paper shacks, like
just the play where they were playing these I mean
these songs, and I forget one of them it might
be Mississippi Fred McDowell or maybe BUCKA White, but one
of them talks about being like eleven and knowing like

(39:12):
very little guitar, but just being having people be like, no,
it's a dance, you have to keep playing. And they
would just keep giving him shots to keep going. And
these would go to like Dawn, What did.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
You just say A tar tar paper factory, tar paper shack,
tar paper shack.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
I guess it's what it says on the ten. Yeah,
oh yep, wow Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
Until his death in nineteen forty four, led Belly continued
to record and perform across the US. His final concert
was at the University of Texas at Austin in tribute
to John Lowell, Max Allen's father, who died the previous year.
Led belly songs Midnight Special and good Night Irene have
become folks standards, and he was rediscovered in the early

(39:56):
nineties when Kurt Cobain name checked him during Nirvana's MTV
on Plugged performance when he covered his song where did
You Sleep Last Night?

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Also known as in the Pines. Yeah, lead Billion Woody
Guthrie sang that together. I think on radio on a
radio program at one point.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
That is a great performance, and Kurt does it never
I've not heard led bellies.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
I mean it sounds dated in a way. I mean
it's much less purposefully haunting, a little more jaunty. But
he was an incredible musician. I mean he played a
twelve string guitar primarily, and he fingerpicked it and having
one here that I don't play. It's hard to fingerpick
on a twelve string. It's hard to play a twelve

(40:38):
string period unless you're just kind of sweeping through the strings,
because it's such a dampaign in the ass to have
all of them. But yeah, he's a tremendous guitar player singer.
He also played like a squeeze box. There's pictures of
him with like a little accordion. What's all this about
folk song collecting? You get a water, I'll continue. Song

(41:00):
collecting is one of the weirder phrases in the annals
of American history. The job, process, vocation, whatever you wanna
call it, dates back to nineteen twenty six, when a
guy named Robert Winslow Gordon pitched the Library of Congress's
Music Division director, who was a guy named Carl Engel,
on a folk music collecting project that would allow him

(41:20):
to continue the work he'd been doing researching and archiving
folk music from San Francisco and Oakland in the early
nineteen hundreds. That's right, folks, there was a time when
your government cared about culture and art and not f
What are they up to now? F sixteens This was
part of the Works Progress Administration spending In nineteen twenty eight.

(41:42):
Engel was concerned that the advent of industrialization technology like
radio and the phonograph meant that America was going to
be losing its more niche musical cultures, and he established
the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of
Congress with Gordon as its chair. With these, Gordon expanded
his range of collecting from the Bay Area to Georgia

(42:04):
and later Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. However, the Great
Depression caused the project to fall by the wayside in
nineteen thirty two when funds from the government and private
sectors dried up. Shortly after Gordon left, though, John Lomax
independently visited the Archive to consult its collections for his
book American Ballads and Folk Song This is Alan's Dad.

(42:25):
While there, he struck a deal with Engel that he'd
receive a phonograph and wax cylinder recording blanks from the
Library of Congress in exchange for donating all of his
recordings to the archive. Lomax and basically his whole family
he took his kids and wife along with these started
these forays into the South. From this time, they focused
on Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia,

(42:47):
and Virginia. Fun fact, because the government has always been
cheap skates. Lomax worked with the Library of Congress for
over a decade and kept the title of Honorary Curator
until his day, but he was never on payroll. The
Library of Congress expected him to make ends meet through
grant's and his lecture circuit earnings. In nineteen thirty six, though,

(43:09):
Alan Lomax became the Archive's first official employee and was
given both the title of Assistant in charge and an
annual salary of six hundred and twenty dollars. He expanded
the reach of the project to Haiti and the Bahamas
and brought in Woody Guthrie, with whom he wrote and
co hosted American Folk Songs, which was a twenty six
week radio broadcast by CBS. Things that the Archive ramped

(43:33):
up in nineteen forty when they secured a grant from
a Carnegie Corporation which allowed them to install a recording
studio and started producing recordings in nineteen forty one that
include some of the earliest issued folk music anthologies in
the US. Alan Lomax expit the reach of the archive
by essentially offering the same deal that John got, will

(43:53):
give you the equipment if you give us the songs
to any local folk music researchers, which is really a
step in expanding this outside of the immediate reach of
the Library of Congress. The context of the Folklore Ring
gradually started to shift and started including things like oral
history and photography projects, which are all still on the

(44:14):
website and are all amazing, some incredible photography. It continued
up through the seventies at the behest of this folk
Life Center and then like yeah, like I mentioned, letters
and drawings and all this efemera. It's a little too
granular even for us to get into how it got
away from being specifically folk music. But by nineteen seventy six,

(44:34):
President Ford signed the American folk Life Preservation Act, which
formerly brought the Folk Song Archive under the broad umbrella
of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress.
As of twenty eighteen, the Archive of Folk Culture encompasses
twenty seven hundred collections that contain one hundred and fifty
thousand sound recordings and over three million items total. It

(44:58):
branches into oral histories conducted with the former slaves, specific
oral histories photographs based around particular cities. There's one on Patterson,
New Jersey that I was particularly taken with. And it's
all online for free. So for anyone who is interested
in American history, it is an invaluable research. Big ups

(45:18):
to the Library of Congress. You know, your beloved Library
of Congress, My beloved Library of Congress. I don't know, man,
like the government used to care about this kind of
You know, they weren't always just inventing magic numbers and
throwing them at genocide or you know, blowing up brown people.
They were like invested in culture.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
You know, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll
be right back with more.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
Anyway, when people talk about Alan Lomax, they usually talk
about his so called Southern Journey that took place from
nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty throughout Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama,
and Georgia. What Max had fled the US for much
of the fifties because of the McCarthy era witch hunts
and their particular fondness for targeting folky types. Upon its

(46:25):
return in nineteen fifty seven, and witnessing the nascent folk
music boom in and around Greenwich Village in New York City,
for which he was partially responsible, he recoiled. As he
wrote in a letter, some of the young folk knicks
who dominated the New York scene asserted that there was
more folk music in Washington Square on Sunday afternoon than

(46:45):
there was in all of rural America. Apparently it made
them feel like heroes to believe they were keeping a
dying tradition alive. The idea that these nice young people
who were only just beginning to learn how to play
and sing in good style might replace the glories of
the real thing frankly horrified me.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Good for him. Yes, this is what I hate about
the Folks Bible. I mean, other than the fact that
it did spawn so much great music and people who
were genuinely interested in it, it also spawned garbage like
the Kingston Trio, and all these clowns were just wearing
like ice cream shirts.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
Tom Dooley, Yeah, hang down your hit, Tom Dully, like
just completely whitewashing it and making it the most I mean,
I just talked about how all this stuff was like forged.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
In blood and dirt, and you got these sounds up
there singing like immaculate three part harmonies about murder. They're like,
how do you make songs about murder? Boring in milk toast?
And white people did it so well.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
I just interviewed a bunch of the Beach boys and
Al Jardine, one of the Beach Boys, he's the guy
who brought Sloop John B to Brian Wilson to do.
It's just one of the big Beach boys hits off
of pet sounds. He knew it through the Kingston Trio,
and the Kingston Trio knew it as an old like
Caribbean sea shanty song.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Do you know where they got it? Nowhere? Alan Lomax, Dude, Well, sure, yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
That's what I'm been blying. Yeah, trace the lineage from
yes exactly, Yeah, Yeah, this is hilarious. In nineteen thirty five,
Lomax flew from Florida to Nassau in the Bahamas, where
he started doing recording of the island, particularly the sponge
Fishers of Cat Island.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
It says in his biography, and then they were told
to leave because they were suspected of being labor agitators.
But some of the songs that they got from this
were I Bid You good Night, which was famously sung
by the Grateful Dead at the close of all of
their classic lineup shows, and in the vernacular this song
is actually titled heast or Hoist Up the John b Sale. Anyway,

(48:51):
so you were talking about the Beach Boys as you
always do, well.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Alan Lomax had a desire to correct this, and he
pitched Atlantic Records to equip and fund his next journey,
which would be his shortest and just two months long.
But Lomax was no longer toting around a phonograph and
wax cylinders. He was now armed with a more modern
Ampec six to OHO one reel to reel tape recorder,
a mixer, and external microphones like an RCA D seventy seven,

(49:16):
a ribbon microphone that now goes for between two thousand
and three thousand dollars, and an Altech lipstick mic that
also goes for up to like two grand now. And
all of us weighed about three hundred pounds, so it
wasn't easy I.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Mean really, yeah, really incredible, and some of those I mean,
it just goes to show how much you can do
with good analog equipment. I mean you did. Some of
those recordings are still just beautiful stuff.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Atlantic Records stake in the project included a seven LP
collection named the Southern Folk Heritage Series in nineteen sixty
The twelve LP Southern Journey Series for Prestige International Records
was also taken from this trip. Of course, the tracks
included were guided by the music industry. Notes for reissues
of the Atlantic sets see Lomax admitting the set reflects

(50:04):
to some extent what the Ertigans, Ama and Nushi, the
founders of Atlantic Records, felt might best reach their pop audience.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Loacs, to his credit, attempted to break a few of
these subjects. As part of the Folk Revival. He booked
singers like Almita Riddle, Hilbert Smith ed Young, and Bessie Jones,
whose voice turns up in Moby's work at the Newport
Folk Festival in nineteen sixty four. Mississippi. Fred McDowell was
probably the biggest beneficiary of this journey. He was able

(50:33):
to because of his genial and affable nature and tremendous
songs and fingerpicking. He was able to make a living
from live performances on the back of this of this
quote unquote rediscovery. It's funny I read a biography of
Skip James, who was actually re rediscovered by John Fahey.

(50:54):
John Fahey and his buddy got Skip James out of
a hospital by paying his hospital bill, and John Fahey,
true to forum because he was an ass would for
years afterwards say I bought Skip James. But yeah, there's
a fascinating biography about Skip James called I'd Rather Be
the Devil, which is the name of one of his tunes.
And that guy was prickly. He was not a pleasant

(51:17):
man by all accounts, and consequently did not really make
an affable pop singer the way that Mississippi Fred McDowell did. Anyway,
back to Vincent Van Moeb play was produced on mostly
secondhand equipment at Moby's Mott Street Home studio in Manhattan,
New York, from August nineteen ninety seven through nineteen ninety

(51:38):
eight altogether. I worked on it for a year, he
told Chaos Control back in nineteen ninety nine. I mixed
it there then. I wasn't happy with it. Then I
went to one outside studio to mix it, went to
another outside studio, and then I ended up coming back
here and doing the mixing myself. So I wasted a
lot of time and money. He also told the site
that Play's track list was whittled down to eighteen from
around two to three hundred songs. Ultimately, playtracks Honey, Find

(52:04):
My Baby and Natural Blues were air quotes composed by
Moby around vocal hooks sampled from songs in the Lomax collection.
These are, respectively, by Bessie Jones her recording of Sometimes
Boy Blue from Joe Lee's Rock and Via hall Ward
from troubles Hard. Another playtrack, Why Does My Heart Feel
So Bad, is lifted from a song called He'll Roll

(52:25):
Your Burdens Away by the Banks Brothers and the Greater
Harvest back Home Choir of Newark, New Jersey, originally released
in nineteen sixty six on Savoy and lastly run On
uses Bill Landford in The Landford Ayers nineteen forty nine
rendition of the traditional folk hymn God's Gonna Cut You Down.
Landford had been a member of the Golden Gate Quartet,

(52:47):
which are actually very influential in the history of the
development of gospel music. Traditional, the four part vocal structure
of what we consider the golden age of gospel quartets,
like the ones that Sam Cook started in the Soulsteerers,
evolved out of what they call these jubilee quartets, which
are actually kind of alien to us sounding because they
were much more concerned with like tight, what we would

(53:08):
consider like barbershop style harmonies, and they were based out
of colleges, some of the first all black colleges launched
these jubilee quartets. Moby said, run On was one of
the first songs written emphasis mind, and it was really
hard to put together because it had so many samples
in it. I didn't use computers at that point. It
was all done with standalone samplers. He also claimed to

(53:30):
have no idea that God's going to cut you down.
Was one of the twentieth centuries most well known gospel
and country standards. There are versions out there by Odetta Elvis,
Johnny Cash, Marilyn Manson, and Tom Jones, among others.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Which one of those people is deepest in hell.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
It's gonna be Marilyn Manson when that finally happens. But
man Be a recent cover.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
Actually, my favorite Tom Jones cover is uh this incredible
version of Talking Heads burning down the House with Nina
I forget her last name from The Cardigans, m.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
The Cardigans, Whither the Cardigans? The Johnny Cash one is
probably my favorite. It's off the American series and it
genuinely sounds haunting, and so of course it's been used
in like truck ads by now, uh god, I mean
Tom Jones kind of rips some of these latter work.
As we talked about in Mars Attacks. Do we do

(54:35):
Mars Attacks? We never did Mars. We're talking about Tom
Jones at one point because we were talking about how
these later careers actually quite interesting.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
I don't remember ever talking about that. You're sure that
wasn't a text conversation with Dave.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Long from the Project of Fugue State, just talking to
your dog. Yeah, probably, Moby wrote, So Tom Jones's later works,
that's dude, Please feed me not an exaggeration, Moby wrote,
Honey in quote about ten minutes he told Rolling Stone

(55:08):
in two thousand and nine, Gosh, I wonder why it
was so easy for you to write, Perhaps because never
mind someone else wrote it. Yeah, my girlfriend at the
time really liked it, he continued, and that surprised me
because she didn't really like my music. I'm wondering if
in his mind this is Natalie Portman. Old Moby Dobe
Doo famously claimed to have dated her. In nineteen ninety nine.

(55:30):
He wrote a memoir in which he claimed this, and
Portman publicly shut it down, recalling the incident as a
quote much older man being creepy with me when I
had just graduated high school. In a classic celebrity bungle,
Moby doubled down and followed the template that's been in
place since time immemorial. He posted proof, which was a

(55:51):
picture of them where he's shirtless, and then he said
people should be paying more attention to climate change. And
then he apologized the picture is right because it looks
like he just took his shirt off in a room
with Natalie Yeah, like backstage. Yeah, and she looks visibly uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
The track find My Baby, Mobe told Rolling Stone, was
quote basically just me playing slide guitar over a vocal sample.
I added what I thought were hip hop drums to it.
In the eighties, I was djaying a lot of hip hop.
At one point I was working at Manhattan's Mars Bar,
and I used to keep a microphone by the turntables
Big Daddy Kane and run DMC and Third Base and

(56:31):
Flavor Flame, and everybody would go down to this club
and get drunk, and I had the microphone. I was
the weird white DJ for all these rappers who were
drinking and rapping to impress their girlfriends.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Shut up, okay, man, He's just everything out of his
mouth is just off putting in some way. It's really astounding.
Why does my Heart Feel So bad? Quote was written
in ninety two as a bad techno song, Mooby continued.
Some might argue, did it change.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
It's the American Coronary Association's same song.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
It really no, Oh, I wouldn't surprise me. You could
throw a dart at something in the late nineties, and
amobi track was probably associated with it.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
The American Cornery Association, an organization I just made up,
would not have a theme song Why does my Heart
Feel So Bad?

Speaker 2 (57:26):
I think you underestimate the stupidity of marketing. Jordan uh,
he said, just mediocre generic techno. At some point I
rediscovered the song and I tried doing it considerably slower.
Tried to make it mournful and romantic. Two of these
songs were pushed for inclusion on play by Moby's managers.
He added, my manager Barry talked me into including Porcelain,

(57:49):
and my other manager, Eric talked me into including why
does My Heart Feel So Bad? Lastly, Natural Blues is
built around Via hall Ward's Immortal Trouble So Hard, as
basically it's entire melody. This one kind of is probably
the most egregious to me, and not just because I
liked it the most, but he just takes her whole performance. Man,

(58:12):
it's the whole melody of the song, which is really
like and we'll get into copyright law on this weird
stuff later, but it like actually gets to the point
of how do you own a copyright on something? Because
you can't copyright a chord progression, right, but you can't
a melody. So he just added like an undergirding of
beats and synthwashes to an existing melody, and it's his

(58:36):
song off Richard, you gotta do it with the John
Hurt voice off Richard Natural Blues.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
We don't talk much about Porcelain in this episode, which
is kind of the only song I knew originally of
this Let's see.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
What where he's stole porcelain from? No, he did write this,
Oh nope, I was wrong. First sample of strings from
the Earnest Gold composition Fight for Survival, from his soundtrack
to the nineteen sixty film Accidents. That's Cool. Porcelain was
prominently sampled on Rapper asap Rockies twenty eighteen Asap Forever

(59:15):
asapsap Rocky. I guess you gotta read the whole thing
out like a tribe called quest. John Lomax, the Elder.
Lomax had met Ward, who was born in Alabama, in
nineteen oh two. He recorded her for the Library of
Congress in the nineteen thirties, saying she had one of
his favorite voices he'd ever recorded. Later, the Library of
Congress played this song in commemoration of the seventy fifth

(59:39):
anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in nineteen thirty seven, almost
sixty years to the date when a nebeshy white guy
would steal it.

Speaker 4 (59:49):
Oooh lining trebo soorhan ooh line trebo Sohan, don't evad
boomer trouble for God.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Don't know about and no man.

Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
Trouble gone went down hel Oh the day, Soul God
Happy stayed.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
All day Oooh. Some of Ward's recordings were released as
an album called Cornbread, Crumbled and Gravy. Another Man, Done
Gone became Vera Hall's most celebrated performance and was a
particular favorite of poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandberg. Right,
that's what Carl Sandberg's deal is. That's all the Lincoln biographies, Okay.

(01:00:39):
Alan lomax to helped secure Ward a booking in nineteen
forty eight at Columbia University. He later wrote of her voice,
the sound comes from deep within her when she sings
from a source of golden light otherwise hidden, and falls
directly upon your ear like sunlight. And Hall died in
January of nineteen sixty four in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
Play was released to relatively muted reception in May nineteen
ninety nine, after having been rejected by every major label
until Richard Branson picked it up on his V two imprint.
Moby said that his publicist sent the record to journalists
and many of them pointedly wrote back saying that they
weren't even gonna listen to it. He recalled the first

(01:01:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Maybe forty people came. Have you seen that Virgin Megastore
videos with Dillinger Escape Plan where the guy just crowd
runs over the audience in the first two seconds of
the song. It's incredible. Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
I used to go to that Virgin megastore all the time,
Marrick greg because they were open past midnight, so you
would go in there like twelve oh one and buy
whatever album you couldn't wait. Remember how exciting that was
when he knew somebody's about to drop a new album.
I guess they still do it, but it's not the
same with your refreshing Spotify.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
I don't think I was. You never did that. No,
I stopped buying new CDs out of financial necessity, like
high school. I just went to the CD warehouse and
bought you stuff. What was the last album that I
was excited about coming out? It might have been something. No.
I mean, I still buy new stuff, but it's mostly

(01:02:21):
for the vinyl release. I don't really I don't pre
save things or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
So giving this low turnout to the Virgin Megastore basement.
Performance expectations were low for Play. Moby really just wanted
to sell us much or slightly more than his biggest hit,
Everything Is Wrong, which would have amounted to slightly over
two hundred thousand copies. Narrator Voice he would sell a
lot more.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
But it took some time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
In fact, it didn't do much on the charts for
the better part of a year. He would later say,
almost a year after it came out in two thousand,
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
two thousand, I was in Minnesota. I was depressed, and

(01:03:05):
my manager called me to tell me that Play was
number one in the UK and it beat out Santana's Supernatural.
I was like, but the record came out ten months ago.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
What a year for music? I mean, have you checked
the charts lately.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
That's when I knew all of a sudden that things
were different. Then it was number one in France and
Australia and Germany. It just kept piling on. The week
Play was released, he continued. It sold worldwide about six
thousand copies. Eleven months after Play was released, it was
selling one hundred and fifty thousand copies a week. I
was on tour constantly drunk pretty much the entire time,

(01:03:44):
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 calls, we're talking about
doing cover stories. It was a really odd phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (01:03:59):
He's so biteful, and I I understand it. I'm a
hypocrite for pointing out anyone's spite, but I will also
point out he achieved success, he made it, man, and
he's still winging constantly.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Well, he also achieved success earlier than that, too, but
he just didn't like it and willfully drove his career
into a mountainside.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Yeah. Man, it's like the Replacements. I mean that Bob
Meyer biography like kind of made me like them less
because they got all these opportunities. Like you know, the
log line of the Replacements is tremendously talented man who
sabotaged their every chance at success. But they did that
in tremendously stupid ways, Like they were recording up in
the Catskills and they wanted to play upright bass on

(01:04:48):
a song, so someone got them an upright bace like
from that was presumably a nice upright pace to using
the studio, and they smashed it. They used to burn
their per diems, which were one hundred dollars a day.
Do you know what a per diem today is for
like a touring musician, And this was like in the
late eighties, early nineties. I'm sure it's like fifty yeah

(01:05:11):
today if you're lucky. So yeah, man, I'm just like
this generation musician. We're just like God, you babies.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Talk about David Crosby, Hegel my friend David Crosby.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Yeah, your close personal friend David Crosby. People live in
their goddamn vans to like make music now, and you
got these chuds notching sales numbers that no one would
ever see again and crying into their offshore accounts over it. Also,
your family's like historically famous. You're telling me there wasn't
like trust fund money for him. There's streets named after

(01:05:44):
your family in New York, like.

Speaker 1 (01:05:46):
The Crosby Street is named after Crosby Street.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
It's not you know, it's his family.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
I know his dad was a cinematographer, an Oscar winning
Cinematogphy in Courtland is his middle name.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Oh yeah, his mom was a Van Cortland. Right, that's right.
I forgot about that. And also his dad was not
like something laboring and obscurity filmmaker one and one Oscar.
I know, I know, here's a cinematographer on high noon.
Where were we? You should cut a lot of that

(01:06:18):
because otherwise I'm gonna get more comments calling me like
a stereotypical music major, even though once again I minored
in music. I majored in English. I'm pretentious for a
different reason. We got a nice comment the other day
on Apple Podcasts. Yeah, mccolts won. Hilarious, funny and very interesting.
I've been binge listening to all the episodes. Fantastic podcast

(01:06:41):
and very well done. Ah yeah, that's nice. As the
guy who gave us one star because there are ads
in it, you're gonna give us one star because we
run ads and you're gonna bitch about like artistic purity.
Off find that guy's IP address, visit him so I
can explain him my pastians. Do you see that's actually

(01:07:05):
a Russell cro bit, my favorite Russia, My favorite Russell
crow tweet about maybe my favorite celebrity tweet of all time.
I think he's tweeting about climate change and someone is like,
stick to acting homeboy or something, and Russell Crowe's response
tweet is simple facts One, I'm not your boy. Two

(01:07:27):
like climate change is real or something. Send me your
home address so I can visit you and explain my passions,
Like my favorite threat of all time, visit you and
explained my passions from an Australian. That's terrifying. As you

(01:07:48):
meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too
much information after these messages, and now we're going to
talk about gap ads. Oh yeah, yeah, this will really

(01:08:09):
keep my blood pressure at a dull roar. This was
helped The sales figures were helped by one of the
most successful sink campaigns in the history of music, which
eventually saw every single song on play licensed for use
in film, TV or commercials. Wired magazine called the campaign

(01:08:32):
quote a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album
was of financial success months before it reached its multi
platinum sales total. Also, it eventually sold twelve million copies worldwide.
Didn't even need these sinks. I mean, arguably the sinks
helped you. Blah Blah Blah is the best selling electronic
album of all time. Moby himself could be seen in

(01:08:54):
ads for the Gap, and he appeared at the Salt
Lake City Olympics, which is the whitest sentence of all time.
This strategy actually dated back to the go era. Moby's managers,
Marcy Weber and Barry Taylor were called the huge splash
that Moby's atmospheric god moving over the face of the waters.
I actually liked that song quite a bit. Which soundtrack,

(01:09:16):
the climax to Michael Mann's Heat in nineteen ninety five,
had made in the film scoring industry, so they quote
invited every music supervisor in Hollywood to a party and
dinner during the Independent Slam Dance Festival in nineteen ninety
six to try and tap that market. So then when
play came around, Barry Taylor told Wired, we made a
conscious effort to create a marketing plan that had nothing

(01:09:38):
to do with radio. Consequently, Porcelain played on behalf of
Bailey's Irish Cream and Nordstrom find My Baby for American Express.
On April twentieth, two thousand, almost eleven months after the
album's release, the producers of a British television program faxed
request to use the lone album track that hadn't yet
been licensed. No one actually expected seven, a brief, unremarkable

(01:10:00):
bit of incidental music, to be purchased. When the facts arrived,
Barry Taylor recalled, we celebrated. David Steele, head of special
projects including licensing at Mobey's label V two, told The
New York Times in two thousand and one it was
very short lived, but we made a lot of money
in all, he told the paper. They signed over one
hundred licenses in North America alone, for which Moby's cut

(01:10:22):
was as of March two thousand and one, around a
million dollars. That's it. It seems low. Yeah, go to
the customary inflation calculator, all right, So like two point
three million, that still sounds low. A two point three
out million from one hundred sinks? What does that breakdown too?
Like ten thousand a sink? That's about right. I mean,
because this was also the kind of the Nasson era

(01:10:42):
of that really I mean, people were a lot of
ad campaigns are probably using library and stock music. At
the time, it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Cous like seven grand they get a song for the
Paul Anka podcast, like an old standard for a podcast.
We didn't have the rights to put on social.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
Because people got smarter about it, they wisened up. This
was kind of the wild west of it. Really. Per
that New York Times article, what.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
We would tell Hot Press Magazine when I licensed the
music from Play. The goal was simply to get people
to hear the music. Most of the licenses weren't particularly lucrative,
but they enabled people to hear the music because otherwise
that record wasn't being heard. In a different interview, he
split some Harris about the every song was licensed thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
It's a misleading truth, he told.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
American Songwriter in two thousand and five. Yes, every song
was licensed, but some of the songs were licensed to
tiny independent film productions that were never seen by anyone.
One of the songs was licensed for an Australian student
film by some guy in college in Sydney. He continued,
Play became successful in Los Angeles before it became successful
anywhere else. We started getting licensing requests from movies and

(01:11:44):
TV shows, and then it just took off from there.
The earlier adopters were music supervisors in Los Angeles. When
opportunities to get the music heard came along, we jumped
at them. At that time, there was really no radio
support that informed all the licensing, anything we could do
to try to get more people to hear the music. Haigel,
as a very principled musician, how do you feel about

(01:12:05):
that strategy?

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
I mean, again, at the time for a guy who
was already like a live draw and a semi famous musician, like, yeah,
that's a little annoying, but also, as I mentioned later,
very precient. Nobody makes any money nowadays except from touring
and licensing. Uh So, obviously that conversation is disintegrated. But

(01:12:30):
you know, it's interesting he's so defensive about it. Man,
I was reading this interview where he was like, he
talked about playing in punk and hardcore bands, and he
was like, where I was playing in those bands. Some
people considered playing a show to be selling out, some
people considered making a record to be selling out. So
there's always been that those hardliners. But I don't know, Man,

(01:12:51):
one hundred sinks for eighteen songs is aggressive like, that's wild.
That's a lot. I just yeah, I mean, I mean
it's fine. I just it's not some like come from
behind story. It's not like some unsigned guy. He had
Richard Branson's label doing this for him. Like, come on, man,

(01:13:12):
it's not it's not an indie band that made their
career off a single sink in a like an iPod
commercial back in the day. I mean, he had a
multimillion dollar corporation doing this placement for him. He had
two managers. Like, there's nothing grassroots or independent about that
at this point, which is kind of the justification. It's
just a rich white dude getting richer. Did you ever

(01:13:34):
read that thing in his memoir about Lona del Rey. No,
he was like trying to trying to, you know, boinker
and in the biblical sense, the biblical sense. Yeah. And
they were in his apartment and I think he wanted
to like play a song or something, and but he
was like, oh, that's on my other floor or like
the hard driver laptop is on the other floor of

(01:13:55):
my apartment. And she was like, you know, you're the man,
and he said it took him a secon and to
realize she didn't mean that as a compliment. She meant
that he as like a straight white musician with a
two floor apartment in downtown Manhattan, was like the system
and he was like and that that kind of took
me back. It was like, yeah, dude, I don't know, man,

(01:14:15):
it's such a thorny conversation and like, I've given up
on it. Man, Like I would kill, for a think,
for any of my music right now. You know, it'd
be great any song anyone, even the bad ones, especially
the bad ones, especially the bad Yeah. But it's just like, yeah,
it wrinkles a bit. And I think the reason that
this pisses me off the most is that, you know,

(01:14:37):
none of these people knew who her a whole word
it was. He didn't even thank them in the liner notes.
He never even named these people. He thanks Alan Lomax
in the in the in the liner notes, but whe
guy who found it, Yeah, you know. So that's why
I think it leaves the worst taste in my mouth. Man.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Have you ever invited a girl over to your house
to play or a song you wrote?

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
No, I usually did that when I went to their
house and they had a guitar. Fair Also in that interview,
Mobe talks about his drinking days, which is inspired me
to go on this tangent. He said, once when I
was in Belgrade, I got drunk with all these ex
soldiers who introduced me to concrete. Basically, you take half

(01:15:20):
pint beer and pour in a load of vodka. The
weird thing is it tastes really good. He also contends
he had a wild night out with Tommy Lee and
Pantera's Dimebag Daryl, during which at the end they all
decided to start a band together, and then Dimebag was murdered.
I investigated this drink, concrete, and I found it in
a Wikipedia entry for it in Russian, where it is

(01:15:41):
called yorshe, which translates to a little spiky fish. I
don't know where he got concrete. Maybe that's the Serbian.

Speaker 1 (01:15:54):
Because it wasn't he in the band a wall. Maybe
that's part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Haha, congratulations, it's the worst local the.

Speaker 5 (01:16:00):
Show callback call back comedy timing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:14):
You know what the most important part of comedy is?

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
You say it? Timing?

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Anyway, yorsh friend of the friend of the pod. That
is a hardcore alcoholic drink. I will I will tell
you vodka in beer. It sounds like awful. I guess
they do that with They do that, don't they do
that with the They do it in the UK they
call it a snake bite. Oh yeah, Vodkas inCider. Anyway,

(01:16:48):
many people seem to think that we pitched the music
for ads only. Obie's UK manager Eric Harrold told hitmaster
dot Com in two thousand and three, Where's the truth
is that we just responded to the requests. The ads
selected were very carefully chosen, and we actually turned down
more than we accepted. It is also somewhat hypocritical to
label Moby the ad guy when most of his music

(01:17:09):
was really used in film and television and the advertising
usage was fairly limited. I'm gonna still label him the
ad guy. Moby and his management were in the Review
Mirror exceptionally ahead of their time in pimping play Out
to whoever fancied a go over fancied a bit of
a knees up with her.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
Oh wow, knee trembler first of all, knees up as
a dance knee trembler.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
That's interesting. The album came out literally two weeks before
the launch of Napster signaled the end of the music industries.
People know it, and nobody would be bulking at licensing
songs once Spotify hit the US about a decade later,
and not content with simply beating the corpse of the
music industry, set about defiling it. If you were sweedish,

(01:17:53):
you owe us an apology for Daniel Eck just a
note to any of our listeners. However, plays engagement with
and or straight up theft of black people's literal voices
to craft platinum selling car commercials hasn't aged particularly well.
It's worth noting that of the first five singles released
from Play, four of them were based on this rubric,

(01:18:14):
oh and one of the album's B sides, Flower, was
also lifted from a Lomax recording, in this case Green
Sally Up, as performed by Maddy Gardner, Mary Gardner and
jesse Lee Pratcher, oh and also plays closing track My
Weakness contains a manipulated sample of a vocal performance of
dance Niwindigaco di Tiga, a truditionial Kanak song performed by

(01:18:39):
the indigenous people of Tiga Island near Malaysia, recorded by
a French ethno musicologist asked for the source of the
sample in two thousand and one on his website, Moby said,
I don't know. It's in some strange African dialect, so
I have no idea what's being said. Obviously, Africa and
Malaysia are different places.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Hilariously, at least one person tried the warn movie about
all this appropriation. He told The New York Times that
when playing early versions of the play material for friends,
one said he should be cautious. The fact that I
was a white kid from the twentieth century sampling African
American vocals from the early twentieth century had never even
crossed my mind, he said.

Speaker 6 (01:19:22):
In the long, non illustrious history of white people pilfering
African American culture, have I just perpetrated that I'm motivated
by a love of the music and by a love
of the performances, And I really hope I haven't done
anything bad.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
Narrator voice, HEO just perpetrated that what we told Rolling
Stone that he considered Natural Blues his favorite of plays singles,
but added it almost didn't make it on the record.
I had some friends over and I was playing them
songs off the record, and they thought it was just
too weird. You have a point about this.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
Well, it's unclear if it was the same friend with
an understanding of racio dynamics in both instances, if you
were a love warned Moby about using black people's voices
to make music to shop for khakis too, TMI wants
to hear from you. No, we don't, Yeah, we don't. Actually,
you know, man appropriation is especially thorny in music, right,

(01:20:15):
because that's the history of music. I mean, jazz, America's
only native art form other than burlesque, comes from the
literal marriage of African rhythms and pitch blending with European
harmony and European instruments. Right, So that's what I find
so truly fascinating about it and this country. But feel confused. No,

(01:20:36):
I was just.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Trying to think of other elements of black culture that
have been appropriated more than just in the last forty
or so years.

Speaker 2 (01:20:46):
I mean black fashion, more recently, everything black fashion, rapping,
GJ culture is black from Jamaica originally. And then the Bronz's.

Speaker 1 (01:20:55):
Interesting that of all the things like I can't think
of like pilfering, like making this up, but like black
painting styles for example, Like it's interesting that music is
the thing that we tend to raid from that culture. Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:21:07):
I mean I think a lot of that breaks down
into access. I mean a lot of the black artists
who were familiar in the popular consciousness, like Bosquiocht got
I can't name very many others, but it was an
access issue, man. I mean some of the some of
the people who are you see in art museums as
black artists. Hendy Wiley, Barack Obama's portraitist famously I named two.

(01:21:32):
How about that. I'm a good I'm one of the
good white You're an ally? No, But I think it
was an access issue. I mean a lot of these
guys weren't given the opportunity to pursue the arts in
any way until the gi Bill. You know, if you
go to like a lot of big Afro art exhibits
post war, a lot of them are xgis who were

(01:21:55):
were able to do that, and then a lot of
the pre war stuff is slotted into sort of like
the American primitivist styles or it's like, you know, Bill
Traylor is one of them, Who's this guy who just
like painted on garbage because that was the only like
scrap would you know? It became a celebrated outsider artist,
or it's slot slotted into that somewhat ghettoizing term of

(01:22:17):
outsider art, dehumanizing term, literally othering term outsider art. You know,
uh yeah, but music is so thorny man. I mean,
Miles Davis's vans were extremely integrated. Charlie Parker's bands were integrated.
They didn't care as long as people could play. And
I think that is beautiful. But I also think the

(01:22:37):
conversation around it has evolved to the point that if
you're gonna do this, like at least give credit. And
he doesn't. He doesn't. He confused Malaysian people for African people,
like he thanks Alan Omex again in the liner notes,
does not name any of these women, does not name
any of these artists, Like it's just lazy man. I mean,

(01:23:01):
thanking the straight white guy who himself, you know, profited
off of these people's voices and not think those people
is galling. I really have a problem with that. And
it is bad enough that, like, you know, if you're
playing rock music at all, or anything derived from rock
music as I have most of my life, and even

(01:23:22):
studying jazz, like certainly like you're in debt to black people.
I'm sorry you are, but rock and roll would not
exist without the blues, and the backbeat is essentially like
taken from the Clave, which is an Afro Caribbean rhythm.
Like you don't get any music except for like Western
classical and pure appellation folk without black people man and

(01:23:46):
writing them out of these massive, massive successes, not just
twelve million copies sold, but the collective impact that this
made on culture through all of these sync license and everything.
It's like one of the most glaring examples of whitewashing
that I can actually think of ever. But also, you know,
in the context, this was just kind of part for
the coorus, I mean Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy, Slim,

(01:24:10):
Daft Punk, Porous Head, all white and all using stuff
from everything from like reggae to soul, R and B
and funk, deep Cuts, Porta's Head were using a lot
of so called library music, which is music that was
recorded for stock use in film and TV. The British
library music has quite extensive stuff, but those were essentially

(01:24:31):
white British musicians being told to produce versions of soul
and jazz that were going to be free to use
in TV. And this is you know, all part of
the larger conversation that two straight white guys should not
be having. But this is into the hip hop era too,
and there had been conversations about sampling and hip hop,
although they were flipped and be like, how dare these

(01:24:52):
black people take songs from white people? You know, Steely
Dan successfully sued the rappers who used a sample from
one of their sitter guns. He used black Cow. I
think this was a little less in the conversation because
at this point people were just talking about the East
Coast West Coast feud and tupacin Biggie getting shot. But
you know, I remember did he getting flak fod taking

(01:25:14):
I'll be missing you essentially whole cloth, not really changing
a note out of Sting's pocket. I know right that
poor starving Sting.

Speaker 1 (01:25:25):
Can't even afford a last name yeah, or a new base.

Speaker 2 (01:25:33):
He had to buy one less sex swing for his
palatial mansion with true Trudy Styler, sorry, one fewer sex swing.
The absurdity of sampling law and copyright law around his
time is really illustrated very well by a case that
Lomax is in fact connected to That's right, Alan Lomax

(01:25:54):
is a writing credit on jay Z's Takeover, which is
a Nase Diss track follow Us on the musical Journey.
The song Takeover is based partially on a short sample
from Sound of the Police by Karaswan Whoop Whoop so
Sound of the Poos that uses a sample of Inside
Looking Out by Grand Funk Railroad. However, Grand Funk recovering

(01:26:16):
the Animals song of the same name. Now the Animals
based that song off of a song called Rosie, which
they learned from a recording made by Alan Lomax of
a chain gang at Parchment Farm, which is one of
the most famous work camps in the South musically in
nineteen forty eight, and Lomax, as he did with most
of these songs and kind of a knock against him,
owned the copyright to that recording. But listening to the

(01:26:40):
Rosy Lomax recording, it sounds more similar to a song
by Nina Simone called Be My Husband. That is, it's
almost it's the exact same song, just gender flipped, and
that song is technically written by her piece of husband
and manager Andrew Stroud, so he owns the copyright on
Anina simon own version of a song that was ownerless

(01:27:04):
because it was sung on a work camp. And then,
further complicating this whole mess, the KRS one sample is
based off of an instrumental jam that Grand Funk went
into as part of their cover. So that has nothing
to do with the animals that that was just a
jam they came up with. But Grandfunk Railroad are credited

(01:27:26):
as songwriters on this jay Z track. And also, as
I mentioned at the top of the episode, David Getta
his song Hey Mama is also built around this rosy
vocal line. So let's trace the absurd lineage of all
this shit and see if we can make any sense
of copyright law. All right, here's Rosie recorded in nineteen

(01:27:46):
forty eight at Parchment Farm. Em Woman, Gala, Woman, Gala.

Speaker 4 (01:28:00):
God beyond Man.

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
It's funny.

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):
The only song I know intimately of all the ones
you're gonna play is the animal song.

Speaker 2 (01:28:18):
Okay, Well, here's the animals doing inside, looking out.

Speaker 1 (01:28:21):
Sitting here lonely like a broken man.

Speaker 2 (01:28:25):
So my time in Dona, Yes, I came, I was involved.
This around, didn't mean but I don't want you simple
And then covering the animals, we have Grand Funk. As
I mentioned, though, the portion of Karras. Sample comes from
their Jam in the Middle.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
And Cars One sample that for Sounds of the Police.
It's the whitest that title's ever been said.

Speaker 7 (01:29:11):
Stun clear, donnuck your hut, Sun, where I start your cow?
W where I w w out?

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
We run too?

Speaker 1 (01:29:18):
Yup?

Speaker 7 (01:29:18):
Please soun jump were put on the fuck I notice
where I'm back?

Speaker 2 (01:29:22):
You don't like how I hacked selling cracks? Would you
be doing that?

Speaker 7 (01:29:26):
I got to say, see you?

Speaker 1 (01:29:28):
How would be? And jay Z sample that for the
track Takeover on two thousand and one's the Blueprint.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
We had the Jacap freak. Wait we run in it stretch?

Speaker 7 (01:29:40):
Oh we spoke running this wretched Chris Sidney, We run
in this wretch. We run to yup. A wise man
told me don't argue with pools because people from a
distance can't tell who was tools to start with the
chout from Rome, please leave it alone, don't.

Speaker 2 (01:29:57):
Go Raps and Rome and David Ghetto featuring Nicki Minaj
and bb Rexa singing the hook later. So that's probably
actually Alan Lomax recording.

Speaker 7 (01:30:18):
Yes to be a Woman, Yes, Yes, can tell.

Speaker 3 (01:30:22):
Me when you win?

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
Absurd insane world we live in anyway, getting back to Moby.
This is the grossest part of this to me, and
it has not been covered. If I were making any
money off this and had more time, I would reach
out to Moby and the Alan Lomax Archive, because the
lone source that I can find for this is a
Washington Post article from two thousand that suggested that the

(01:30:47):
Lomax Archive and mom Moby were in legal negotiations because
they alleged that they had not seen either as much
or any of the money that they should have for
the licensing of these songs. Lomax was eighty five and
bedridden at the time after a series of strokes, so he,
as we mentioned, one of the ethically dubious things that
he did, was hanging onto these copyrights. Though to his credit,

(01:31:11):
if he had contact information for the people who recorded
these songs. He was in the habit of sending the money.
I mean it could be like a five to fifteen
dollars a year, but he did attempt to send the
money from the proceeds of this. His daughter, Anna told
the Washington Post that the Lomax organization, as of printing,
hadn't seen a dime from Moby, and that they had

(01:31:31):
actually wanted to use this money to locate these performers
or their errors and give them some money. I'm perplexed,
Anna told the paper. I'd be surprised if they didn't
want to share in their good fortune with Alan and
with the performers. I feel very strongly that the artist
should get something out of it, or their heirs wherever
they are. Moby was not quoted in that article, but

(01:31:53):
his aforementioned manager, Barry Taylor, told the post, we've acted responsibly.
We haven't received any money ourselves for any thing. What
that could even mean other than a boldfaced lie, is
unclear to me. He added that licensing fees for the
Lomax samples were properly paid to a meat publishing company,
Warner Chappelle. This is what gets interesting. I did a

(01:32:15):
more digging and found out that the Lomax archive was
a flat fee for sampling, so there was no scalable
royalties paid. They paid a flat fee for the use
of these songs, presumably to Warner Chappelle, and I guess
the Lomax organization thought that, either out of Moby's largesse
or a simple understanding, that these songs sold way made

(01:32:36):
more money than vastly out of proportion to what they
paid for them. Would be nice about it. Boby has
tremendous respect for the Lomaxes. Taylor added, Moby was not
quoted in the piece. We're optimistic that we'll be able
to sort this thing out very soon. We want everyone
to get paid and feel good about the project. To date,

(01:32:57):
we don't know if that's happened. No, no, I not no
follow up. They were in legal negotiations about it. I
don't think it went to court. I was probably said
out of court, but can't find anything about it. Like
I said, would have reached out to the Lomac It
probably could find unless there's a gag order in place,
although it may have expired unless it was into perpetuity.
But yeah, man, isn't that scummy and shitty, especially considering

(01:33:25):
this X graft Jordan take us away?

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):
Yes, Moby continued to turn to this particular well for inspiration,
he as he wrote Snag to the Davis Sisters nineteen
fifty six record Lord Don't Leave Me for his song
in This World, which came out on twenty two eighteen.
Hiss follow up to Play eighteen also contained songs built
around vocal samples from blues legend Barbara Lynz, I'm a

(01:33:48):
Good Woman and Sunday, written and performed by Sylvia Robinson,
who founded sugar Hill Records.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
That's right Zobe Robinson, who had hits on her own
as a singer in the fifties and six He's way Onto,
found sugar Hill Records, you know, responsible for launching hip
hop as a commercial concern with rappers Delight and.

Speaker 1 (01:34:07):
Also the eighteen track I'm Not Worried at All. Sample's
the same Banks Brothers recording that why does My Heart
Feel So bad?

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):
Did? Here's the same damn sample twice back to back.

Speaker 1 (01:34:18):
In twenty eighteen's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt a
MOBI album that borrows a very famous quote from Konica Junior.
I believe correct contains like a Motherless Child, which, though
sung by contemporary singer, is a riff on the spiritual
of the same name. In recent years, Moby has been
pressed about the issue of cultural appropriation and has dredged

(01:34:40):
up the classic My black friend said it was okay,
excuse and both an interview and on his website, he
told The Scotsman in twenty twenty one, I played some
of the songs for Chris Rock, and I asked him,
have I done a bad thing?

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
Is he Chris Rock? Chris Rock? Have I done a
bad Yeah? Right, tell me again about the rabbits, Chris Rock.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
Chris Rock looked at me and he said, no, no, Moby.

Speaker 8 (01:35:09):
He said, beautiful music is beautiful. He said beautiful music
is beautiful music. And he said, you've made beautiful music.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
Yes you have, Moby.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
I felt like, Okay, there's an imprimature that comes with
that from Chris Rock. He really assured me. Still in
the same interview, Bobby acknowledged cultural appropriation is a real thing.
Talking to Dan Weiss at Grammy dot Com in twenty nineteen,
he made what You've described as the somewhat baffling claim,
as far as I know, you asking me about cultural

(01:35:43):
appropriation is the closest I've come to a conversation about it,
adding later, I'm sure if I sat down with someone
like Cornell West, I'm sure they'd have a different perspective
on play, and I'm sure that I'd agree with their perspective.
Title tell us about Cornell West.

Speaker 2 (01:35:58):
Oh, he's a famous uh historian who's I think Harvard
for the longest time who is formally considered I think
something of a figurehead in African American studies, and I
think of late has gotten weirder and more reactionary in
different ways. AH twenty nineteen. First, anyone told himbout cultural appropriation, no, Moby,

(01:36:22):
you made beautiful music. That conversation kills me. That is
like how a fourteen year old a ten year old
will recall something. Have I done a bad thing? Chris Rock,
No Moby, you made beautiful music. In that interview, a
Mobey acknowledged that part of his cavalier attitude was because
he assumed that play would end his career, not launch

(01:36:42):
it to new unprecedented heights. If someone had said, you're
making an album that's going to sell twelve million copies,
I might have given it a second thought. From the
time when electronic musicians started sampling, there were only two
criteria for sample based music. Is it good? And are
you gonna get sued? I'm not saying the criteria of
historical sensitivity was invalid, just that it was never part

(01:37:04):
of the conversation. Three years later, though, the Cohen Brothers
and the Lomax Archive proved how to handle this situation.
In a much better way, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou,
the soundtrack of which was a phenomenal out of nowhere
hit and introduced decades of people to Lomax's work, along
with the whole sampling of American folk and blues music,

(01:37:26):
famously inspiring the Mumford Brothers. So maybe we just call
that one a wash. The film's title sequences famously scored
by a performance of a song called po Lazarus that
is credited by Lomax to James Carter at again Parchment
Farm in nineteen fifty nine. The soundtrack won a Grammy Award,
and Lomax's daughter Anna, true to what she said was

(01:37:49):
her initial goal with the play, money that allegedly never came,
went on a national hunt for Carter, who had never
been recorded before or after. He was eventually found at
the age of seventy six living in Chicago, and they
gave him a royalty check for twenty grand and invited
him to the Grammys. Hearing that the Old Brothers soundtrack

(01:38:09):
was out selling Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey records, Carter quipped,
you tell Michael I'll slow down so that he can
catch up with me. He died the next year of
a stroke.

Speaker 1 (01:38:19):
We can't authoritatively rule out Joe Jackson had nothing to
do with that, but.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
I would like to end this on an anecdote. Do
you remember the name Dimitri Erlich from early on in
this episode? Yes, I do, the guy who supposedly loaned
Moby the Lomax collection on CD. Apparently the CDs actually
belonged to Dmitri's younger brother, Gregor, and Gregor Revane haunted
for this by years. As chronicled on an episode of
Jonathan Goldstein's Heavyweight podcast in twenty seventeen, Dimitri, Gregor, and

(01:38:48):
Moby had all been friends in their early squalorous New
York days installed at the Mars Bar, and they'd obviously
lost some contact since Gregor repeatedly as Moby for those
CDs back though for years. He compares the situation to
being a guy who gave Shakespeare a pen once and
wants the pen back. There's a lot in there about

(01:39:10):
Gregor being a failed filmmaker having something of a midlife
crisis of sorts now making films for cleaning products, as
he recalled, and so he began leaving Moby voicemails. By
his count, about a dozen asking for these CDs back
that all went unanswered. He wrote a song called Moby
give Me Back My CDs, which he sang into Moby's
answering machine. As part of this podcast, Goldstein and Erliic

(01:39:34):
fly out to Burbank from New York and then drive
to Moby's house, although in fairness they had made an
appointment with his assistant. They get in there. Gregor's whole
deal is explained to Moby, at which point Moby reveals
that he considered Eminem his professional nemesis and was constantly
haunted by the fact that the rapper outsold him and
dissed him publicly so much that is.

Speaker 1 (01:39:56):
Not related to getting this man CDs back, No no,
but he.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
Sort of reveals at his own midlife crisis. He also
says at one point that somebody related to him this
story of like playing natural Blues at a funeral and
it was like one of the most impactful parts of
her life, and that never would have happened if Gregor
hadn't loaned him these CDs. But Moby says, really the
kick in the teeth of fame is that if you
don't have it, you beat yourself up that you don't
have it, and if you do have it, you're miserable

(01:40:23):
and you kill yourself. Literally, the most depressed I've ever
been my entire life was the height of my professional success. Then,
of course, he reveals that the CDs in question, he
believes are at a storage space in Queen's about as
far across the country as one could get from this conversation.
So Gregor leaves empty handed, but three days later he
receives an email from Moby reading, in part, I realized

(01:40:45):
I never said a true, heartfelt thank you for giving
me those CDs, so, in all sincerity, thank you. I'm
sorry it's taken so long to say thank you. It's
such a god damn shame. He never thanked any of
those black people though. I'm Alex Heigel, and this has
been too much information.

Speaker 1 (01:41:03):
Also, I want to add it sounds like this guy
never gave him those CDs, but loaned them to Boby,
who then just took them for his very.

Speaker 2 (01:41:11):
Own little on the nose there as far as metaphors go.

Speaker 1 (01:41:16):
And I'm Jordan Runtogg. We'll catch you next time. Too
Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (01:41:26):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown, and Jordan Runtog.

Speaker 1 (01:41:30):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder.

Speaker 2 (01:41:32):
June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan
Runtog and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:41:37):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Moby's 'Play': Everything You Didn't Know