Voodoo Child's Baby Monkey: Moby's Unfortunate Gasp at Critical Credibility

...so this morning, I was on an airplane. It was a short, uneventful flight, one where we passengers didn't even get the requisite bag of peanuts or shortbread cookies -- just sodas and juice that we had approximately three minutes to drink before our descent began and we had to toss them. Now, I don't fly often, but this particular flight felt particularly easy, given that my last two plane trips have been long jaunts to Vegas, most of which involved at least one stopover and some form of delay. This was practically a puddlejump, this flight to DC.

I've been fighting a bit of a cold all weekend, however, and I had to get up at 3:45 this morning to make sure I got everything out the door and to the airport on time (of course I forgot things anyway, but who wouldn't at four o' freakin' clock in the morning?!). So I'm not feeling too great to begin with, right? Well, as we started our descent, a pressure began to form in and around my right eye -- in my lower forehead, behind the eye, on the cheekbone below the eye, everything started to ache. As we got lower and lower to the ground, the ache turned into a more pronounced pain, which morphed gradually into an extreme stabbing pain. Putting my hand over my eye to block out the light didn't help, gently pushing it in a futile attempt to relieve pressure only made it worse. I was seeing mental pictures of my eye exploding, a mess of blood on the seat in front of me, screaming passengers all around me, while I muster up little past a pained, dumbfounded, slightly apologetic facial expression, a little disgusted, a little relieved that the constantly growing pressure had reached its breaking point --

-- and then it was gone. I heard a little squeak in my nose when the pain subsided, leading me to believe that the change in pressure brought on by the descent simply messed with my sinuses a bit, causing that brief, excruciating bit of pain.

* * *

Baby Monkey is a similar pain, no less severe, even if it's more the emotional kind of pain than any sort of physical tears-in-your-eyes thing. At least, this is pain if you respect Moby as an artist, one who is capable of putting out some of the most blood-pumping, heart-wrenching music of any scene, one who I've been paying close attention to for over ten years now. Baby Monkey is attributed to Moby's alter-ego, Voodoo Child, a label that some have taken to be Moby's "dance music" persona, which just seems so wrong that it happens to be where the pain begins. Why? Moby is Moby's freaking "dance music" persona. He built his rep on dance music, mostly because he created some of the best dance music around, alternately unabashedly joyful and painfully beautiful, sometimes over the course of the same song. Voodoo Child, on the other hand, was once Moby's ambient alter ego, one less bent on titillation and more concerned with soothing the most savage of beasts. The first full-length Voodoo Child album, The End of Everything, ranks with the best "ambient" CDs in my collection, one where stillness reigns and beauty is in distant sunsets (expressed mostly via unobtrusive beats and lots of string synths).

Of course, Play (on its own a really, really awesome album) happened and changed everything.

As Play's two-year reign over the radio and television airwaves started to wind down, it wasn't clear what Moby would do for an encore until the followup, 18, was actually released. 18 revealed that Moby was content to stay in the place that brought him success, a happy place that had him labeled a genius of music and marketing. Not even a stubborn refusal to license the songs on 18 could shield him from the critical backlash that would follow.

Moby himself admits that this album was a reaction to the Play/18 phenomenon in the liner notes for Baby Monkey, explaining that Baby Monkey was borne of an endless night of dancing in Glasgow, which reminded him (and I quote) "of just how much [he loves] hard, sexy, straightforward dance music". Moby set out to make an "underground dance album" with Baby Monkey, effectively becoming an imitation in a genre for which he once innovated.

And my pain becomes more pronounced.

...and then, on paragraph 9, a discussion of the music finally began...

I'll admit, "Gotta Be Loose in Your Mind" is not an absolutely terrible way to lead off the album. Moby takes his now practically trademarked trick of taking an old soul sample and working it into distinctly Moby-sounding music, here putting it on top of a generic dance beat (boom-ch-plonk-ch-repeat) with some wakka-wakka synth noises and a vague sense of build. It's admittedly nothing spectacular, but it's got some nice bass tones to it, and it's not complete crap, either.

Even so, it ends after hardly acknowledging you and going off to dance with the cool kids, letting "Minors" into the club to take over the conversation. It is "Minors" that introduces perhaps the most disturbing trend on Baby Monkey -- that of insisting on naming the songs after something in the song. "Minors" refers to the minor-key chord synth pads that make up the backbone of the song. There are other tracks on the album called "Strings", "Synthesizers", and (God help me) "Electronics". Look, I realize that there's something to be said for letting the music do the talking, and it's true that I'd be just as critical if Moby put 90-word titles on these things that told us what the songs' stories are, never giving us the chance to formulate our own mental pictures. I can admit that. The problem is that these songs, really, don't contain mental pictures. They are sterile and utterly devoid of human emotion, forgettable mere seconds after they are over. Giving the aural equivalent of lane separation lines names like "Synthesizers" and "Electronics" hints that not even Moby himself was motivated enough to think about the songs long enough to evoke a little bit of mental imagery in his listeners. It would be insulting if it weren't so sad.

As for "Minors", it's better than some of the others, those minor-key synth pads allowing for a fuller sound than a lot of the most generic tracks, but there's just no build, no sense of connection or catharsis. The same could be said for so many of these songs, I fear that repetition is imminent. You have been warned.

A couple of the songs rise slightly above the utterly inane, providing welcome respite in this sea of mediocrity. "Light is in Your Eyes" is actually kind of pretty in that "drive home a melody like a jackhammer into a particularly stubborn rock" kind of way, though its effect is lessened a bit by the fact that its melodic base was re-used for Hotel's much better (though lyrically pretty sucky) "Very". "Obscure" briefly makes an impression by using some percussion sounds that aren't typical techno bass, snare, and hi-hat noises, but mostly, it's just another stupid techno tune. "Synthesizers" meanders a bit, but its latter half is actually a return to the lovely beauty-in-stillness that Voodoo Child once represented. It's a fine end that, unfortunately, I almost never hear since it's not worth sitting through the rest of the album just to get to it.

Because, yes, for every solid moment, there are ten unspectacular ones, for every chord that makes you sit up and take notice, there are twenty generic progressions. Baby Monkey is not simply an imitation of what Moby once was -- it is dangerously close to parody.

And now, for the second time today, the pain is excruciating. I have to stop.

* * *

I still hold out an awful lot of hope for Moby -- you can't attach yourself to an artist the way I have to Moby and not think that maybe, just maybe there's something left in him worth grabbing onto. I mean, his most recent album (Hotel) isn't really that awful, and much of it is pretty good. Still, there's Play...there's Everything is Wrong...there's even The End of Everything. Moby is an artist that has transcended "pretty good" too many times to ever return to it and not be thought a disappointment. Until he can do that again, he's bound to keep disappointing me. Which, I guess, will be OK as long as he never foists something as awful and utterly tossed-off as Baby Monkey on the world again, in which case I may have to write him off altogether.