Despite electronic music's rather purposefully ambivalent nature when it comes to superstars-- no genre loves to have it both ways more-- it's rarely short on recognizable faces when cultural pundits or ad men or rock critics have needed a reference point, whether it's Aphex's advertisements for his bleaching trays or Aqua doing the Roxbury headnod in their candied car. But no one experienced the kind of prolonged commercial and critical success, at least in America, that Moby did.
This is boilerplate observation at this point, but it bears thinking about how something so odd could come to be. Even today Moby hardly lights up a camera, and 11 years later his breakthrough album sounds far from crossover-ready. But this was the 1990s, and a whole lot from that era no longer really makes sense. (Like it even did at the time.) In 1995, a shy, retiring, bald vegan who had been delivered unto the Lord and who made a prog-dance record-- and then a terrible "punk" one, and then one that became its own shorthand for a certain kind of turn-of-the-millennium album-- could actually become a star of the sort used to pimp sugar water and trousers. And of course he played live and put on a capital-S show, which counted for a lot in the decade of the travelling outdoor festival-- something you'll become all too aware of at the tail end of Go: The Very Best of Moby. It's a gag so good/bad I won't even bother giving it away.
And though Moby was very much in the public's mind before 1999's Play set up his retirement fund, that was the album that turned him into an unlikely superstar. So Go makes the polemical/practical (since it basically covers his ongoing tenure at V2) decision to take Play as Moby's for-all-intents-and-purposes Year Zero. Play wasn't an entirely new move for Moby; even as far back as his first hit single, "Go" (which receives a hey-it's-2006 Trentemøller update here), which sampled the eerie strings from the theme to "Twin Peaks", he had been making electronic music that had a muted, forlorn-but-anthemic quality, something Play also had in abundance. The difference was that Play was his most all-around listenable/palatable album for folks not so into hardcore dance, dabblings in jungle, or Mission of Burma covers. And so this combination of melancholy take-it-easy techno and turns at the mic was revisited again and then again on 2002's 18 and 2005's Hotel.
Though hindsight has proven that pairing early 20th century folk and blues recordings with late 20th century beat science (as on "Honey" here) wasn't quite the new idea many excitable press types thought at the time, it's worth remembering that Play was titled more toward Moby in nebbish-pop mode (as on "South Side" here). It's also telling that Play's most foot-friendly track, "Bodyrock", is relegated to a remix on the bonus disc of Go. Time has been kinder to the songs of 18 (as on "We Are All Made of Stars" here) than I'd have initially expected, but I'm still not sure why I should be listening to this guy's semipop when I've still got all those Brian Eno albums and a finite amount of leisure time. Meanwhile, as album titles go, Hotel was a Christmas present to jerks and assholes like me everywhere. As someone for whom a three-star Hotel means I'm living like a Hilton sister, this is indeed the kind of dribbling rock-music-for-airport-Cinnabons that I expect to be playing in high rises I'll never set foot in. While it was probably laudable on some level that he resisted the urge to keep pimping the blues-plus-beat formula that helped make Play a success d'publicité, the flimsy rock songs (as on "Beautiful" here) and flimsy ambient electro-pop (as on "Dream About Me" here) that he's offered ever since are hardly what you'd call largesse towards your audience.
The main problem with this disc is overexposure. Approximately 900 million people bought Play and even those who didn't plunk down $12.99 never need to hear the damn thing ever again. (I just played "Run On", and suddenly I have a craving for a new dishwasher.) That album was Moby's ticket to some kind of contestable techno immortality and the whole of it works a treat much better than the hodgepodge of Go. But if you work in a record store with the injunction to "keep things mellow" before noon, you could do worse, I guess.
