YMMV / Moby

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• Anvilicious:
  • Moby's always been unafraid to speak on his vegan lifestyle, in all places from his music to his liner notes to his social media presence, to the point that he has "Vegan for Life" tattooed on his neck and "Animal Rights" tattooed down his arms. The liner notes to Play amount to lecturing the reader to take up Moby's life choices — especially veganism. The last page is nothing but quotes that excoriate the reader for even considering eating animal products^note In his memoir, he admitted that he went through a phase where he considered fellow Christians who ate meat to be hypocrites and once stormed out of a retreat when he saw everyone else there was eating meat for dinner. Comparatively speaking, his veganism push since then is toned down from how he used to feel. Granted, even he admits in the notes that these messages don't have anything to do with the music.
  • The music video of "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" is anything but subtle in its harsh criticism of cellphone obsession.
• Archive Panic: He's been recording under the Moby name since the beginning of The '90s, and has amassed nineteen albums (twenty if you count the film soundtracks he compiled into the 1997 album I Like To Score), with various singles from each album (and non-album singles) adding up to countless remixes and b-sides. Then he's recorded a few more albums under the name Voodoo Child, and then there's all the compilations of his work, and the deluxe editions of some of his records (some of which add a second disc of his ambient material). There's tons more that he's given away as part of a website he set up for licensing his music for film soundtracks. There's no shortage of material for this guy — listening to everything Moby's recorded in one go would take several days.
• Condemned by History: "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?", and its Steve Cutts-animated music video by extension, used to be hailed as a cautionary tale for the overuse of phones. Nowadays, though, the song and music video have been extensively made fun of and picked apart, with its social commentary being derided as "fake-deep" and incredibly on-the-nose. The mockery intensified during the 2020s, when the COVID-19 Pandemic forced many people to use technology like phones and computers in order to work from home and communicate with others, so many found that the criticisms the song tries to make ring extremely hollow.
• Covered Up:
  • Most people are more familiar with his version of "Natural Blues" than with the original version sung by Vera Hall.
  • To some extent, his version of Mission of Burma's "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", which was a minor UK chart success.
• Critical Dissonance: 18 was considered a retread of Play, and Hotel was considered uninspired (to which Moby actually agreed). Both albums sold in the millions anyway.
• Ending Fatigue:
  • The 10-minute "Face It" from Animal Rights, with its extended coda of distorted solos.
  • The US release of Animal Rights is curiously sequenced, with the heavy rock songs the album is known for frequently broken up by ambient and classical pieces, that make for an odd dichotomy for an alternative rock album (if typical for Moby). The biggest momentum-killer is "Alone," which is 10 minutes of tribal drums and light synths.
  • The 18 b-side "ISS," 9 minutes of a mid-tempo, semi-ambient shuffle.
  • Moby's ambient stuff stretches out a lot. "Reject" surpasses 18 minutes. The Long Ambients albums are four-hour behemoths, so those are probably for diehard ambient fans only.
  • Moby put out some work under the name Voodoo Child as an outlet for his more traditional techno work, and he certainly makes the most of it, with songs often hitting 6 minutes, 9 minutes and even 20 minutes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Due to it being used in a push-up/squat/leg-lift challenge named the "Bring Sally Up" challenge, the Play B-side "Flower" gained new life in the fitness community — as well as widespread infamy among those who live in fear of the challenge.
• Fandom Rivalry: A very common target for Eminem fans, ever since he was a target for Marshall Mathers himself. Eminem has since expressed regret at the way he behaved toward Moby, though that's hardly stopped his fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Depending on who you talk to, Hotel may or may not exist, and if it does, it's usually just one of the two discs that exist.
  • The majority of the Moby fanbase tends to agree that Animal Rights never happened, though. However, it does have its fans and Moby has since come to grips with its bad reputation, calling it "sort of a hidden record."
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Moby has always been more popular in Europe than in the US. His first single, "Go," was barely a blip in America but was a massive UK hit, resulting in several tours of England and other western European countries before he even had an album.
• Growing the Beard: Everything Is Wrong was the first record where Moby really expanded his musical palette beyond his 90s rave music. Play mostly dropped the heavy techno and grew the beard even longer.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Critical reaction to 18. It went to #1 in numerous countries anyway.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Moby's duet with Gwen Stefani on "South Side." Especially the chorus; let's just say Gwen was a great choice.
  • Moby's voice is also surprisingly good on here as well. He's not technically a bad vocalist. He's just unaware that he's mostly a bass/baritone (vocal part) and it's when he wails in the tenor range and is clearly straining that he sounds frail.
• Narm:
  • The reaction Moby inspired in the '90s when he tried to make heavy rock music.
  • Judging by the snarky Youtube comments, many viewers found the music video of the song "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" to be quite over-the-top and heavy handed.
• Newbie Boom: The new generation of fans that slowly made Play into a sleeper hit.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • At its ear-splitting peak tempo^note 1000 BPM, "Thousand" can be incredibly nerve-wracking and anxiety-inducing. This live performance makes it even scarier using abrasive strobe lights, uncomfortably fast Jump Cuts, and a chilling look of Dissonant Serenity on Moby's face.
  • The artwork◊ for the single "Honey", from Play, is pretty unsettling, which is weird because the track itself isn't really creepy.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: His 2019 memoir Then It Fell Apart, due to several accusations of inaccuracies in the book. One of the biggest controversies involved Moby's claim in the book that he had a relationship with Natalie Portman when she was 20 and he was 33. Portman publicly stated that she was actually 18 years old at the time and never considered them to be in a serious relationship, saying they only knew each other briefly and that Moby's behavior actually made her feel uncomfortable. ("I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school.") Moby continued to insist the two had seriously dated before eventually apologizing to Portman, though the backlash was bad enough that he eventually cancelled the rest of the tour promoting the memoir.
• Popular with Furries: The music video for "Beautiful", which depicts a swingers' party for people in animal costumes that goes horribly wrong.
• Refrain from Assuming:
  • That song from Play that repeats the word "sometimes" over 75 times? It's called "Honey".
  • The "Bring Sally Up" song used for squats in exercise classes the world over? It's actually called "Flower". Made even worse by the fact that "Bring Sally Up" is a mondegreen, and the actual lyric is "Green Sally Up".
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Play did exactly that for Moby.
• Sampled Up:
  • Do you like Alan Lomax blues recordings? You're in luck. He samples the hell out of these.
  • One "sample" isn't even a sample at all, but is instead a full remix. In 1937, a singer named Vera Hall^note who died one year before Moby was born recorded a song called "Trouble So Hard", which Moby remixed and retitled "Natural Blues" for his aforementioned Play album.
• Signature Song: A few candidates for this one.
  • If you're talking '90s rave-era Moby, then it's unmistakably "Go".
  • After he radically shifted his career around the Turn of the Millennium, it shifted to either "Porcelain" or "Natural Blues".
  • And if you're a fan of The Bourne Series, it's "Extreme Ways."
  • And to the general public, it’s probably "South Side."
• Song Association: IMDB cites his music being used in over 200 pieces of media.
• So Okay, It's Average: Last Night got this response from critics and fans, and it underperformed in sales.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Where to begin?
  • "The Rain Falls And The Sky Shudders." It's little more than six minutes of piano mixed with rain sounds, and it's actually more relaxing than it sounds.
  • So much stuff from Play fits here.
    • "Rushing", when the beautiful piano kicks in.
    • "Inside", which is a full-blown ambient track.
    • "Guitar Flute & String", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • "Novio," the intro to I Like To Score. More beautiful piano, plus a sample of a choir singing in Latin.
  • The title track from 18 is so pretty and soothing, it was the intro to his live shows for a while.
  • The ambient second disc from Hotel was so much this trope that it got a standalone release in 2014.
  • "Memory Gospel", one of the Play B-sides. It's a soft track led by an enthralling ambient lead, light percussion, and female singing. Made even more powerful when it was put as background music to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
• Tough Act to Follow: Play is definitely this.
• Vindicated by History: Minor example. Animal Rights has gotten warmer reception over the years, particularly with heavy music fans and listeners able to separate it from his more typical discography. That being said, it's still seen as a weaker effort, though not the utter disaster it was in 1997.
• Win Back the Crowd: It's not often that a popular musician manages to do this twice. Moby went from a niche to a has-been to a mainstream icon to a has-been again and back to a niche, made possible because he's always been a big enough name in Electronic Music to hang in there over the years. As mentioned above, his alternative rock experiment Animal Rights had a disastrous release, but he reinvented himself on the pop/downtempo record Play and slowly became omnipresent in mainstream pop culture. Then, when that success burned out, he managed to win back a lot of respect with the glowingly-reviewed Wait For Me. Moby's been a more modest success since then, which he certainly isn't complaining about.

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