My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (5) Play - Moby

[This is the sixth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Electronic music had always been an underground affair – from its birth in Raymond Scott’s living room and cramped German recording studios, on through the spread of house music in the 1980s – and despite an unprecedented creative and popular boom in the early 90s as it became ubiquitous in clubs, it wasn’t until later in the decade that it finally found crossover acceptance. Though the Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk (among others) became widely-known stars, it would be Moby who would find the greatest mainstream success, and in the process, become synonymous with electronic music, as far as the American buying populace was concerned. The commercial peak arrived in 1999 with Play, which became the first album to have all its tracks – 18 in total – licensed for commercial use. Moby’s very ubiquity made him a polarizing figure among aficionados, as did the recognition that his grand emergence coincided with a movement away from the pure techno that characterized his early career. Play does contain a few up-tempo club tracks (“Bodyrock,” “Machete”), but the emphasis leans heavily on the emotionality he courted on 1995’s Everything Is Wrong. To that end, Moby famously would go directly to the source, deriving most of the album’s vocal samples from old folk and blues recordings. Though the originality of pairing roots music and house rhythms would certainly have earned attention on its own grounds in 1999, Play retains its appeal even after a wave of imitators (not to mention subsequent, lesser Moby material) thanks to the skill with which the arrangements match the hooks. Many tracks are built around little more than piano and drums; others are constructed from similarly plaintive sound loops (as on the ethereal “Porcelain”). This quiet thoughtfulness imbues Play with a unique beauty, sustained from its beginning through to the otherworldly closer “My Weakness.” Critically, of course, Play is a piece of electronica: music whose evolution depends entirely on that of technology, and whose sound, by definition, thus reflects the time of its production. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the album, then, is the very timelessness it creates by synthesizing pieces of music produced decades apart. This timelessness makes Play a pioneering achievement – not just in the genre it helped bring into public consciousness, but in music as a whole.