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Moby: Beaming Into Area:One
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Moby
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You can't swing a glowstick these days without someone declaring the latest multi-artist festival as the successor to Lollapalooza. But what's easy to forget is that before Lollapalooza, there were a handful of European festivals that blazed the trails with eclectic bills and all-night parties.
Well, Moby didn't forget. The multi-platinum Play-meister took his experience sharing European bills with everyone from Sepultura to Radiohead and spun it into a wide-ranging rock/rap/electronica/pop festival called Area:One. With the Roots, Incubus, Carl Cox, Nelly Furtado, Paul Oakenfold, New Order, the Orb, Timo Maas and a number of other DJs in tow, Moby hopes to teach the rockers to dance and the dancers to rock.
He explained to Meridith Gottlieb why Area:One is all about the love, why he can't wait to see Outkast and why you can't believe everything you read about him.
MTV: What motivated you to put together the Area:One tour?
Moby: My main motivation was to put something really interesting and fun together that involved a lot of musicians that I like and that was really eclectic and diverse. Hopefully, in the process, [we'll] expose people to music they might not be exposed to. If someone comes to the show and is a really big Incubus fan and they fall in love with the Roots, Outkast or Carl Cox, that's great. Or if someone comes and they are a great hip-hop fan and they come for the Roots and Outkast and they end up dancing in the rave tent to Paul Oakenfold, that's great, too. So the idea [was to create] this happy, harmonious environment where you can have a lot of different types of music, a lot of different types of people [coming] together in a really nice way.
MTV: Had you gone to a festival that inspired you? What made you think you could pull it off?
Moby: A lot of what inspired me was the festivals in Europe. I would be on bills where there would be myself and some heavy metal bands and hip-hop acts and folk artists. A bill with myself, Björk, Radiohead, Oasis, Sepultura, Iggy Pop, Bad Religion. There is this one festival we did called Pinkpop where it was Korn, Pearl Jam, Live, Björk and myself. I wanted to take that ethos and bring it to North America.
MTV: There have been a lot of safety issues with festivals lately, including the nine deaths at Roskilde last year. Do you have any safety concerns?
Moby: Luckily, the nature of the acts we have on our festival are not the sort of musicians who attract an audience who want to stage dive. Incubus are the closest. They are a harder rock band, but they are also really introspective. I think Incubus fans aren't people who want to go out and slam dance. They are people who want to listen to the music, so I'm hoping that security-wise, we won't have any problems. A lot of the musicians and DJs that we have on the tour appeal to a wide audience. The people in the audience will be white and black, old and young, straight and gay, male and female.
MTV: Some would say that the music has nothing to do with it, but...
Moby: Look at people that have been injured at concerts over the years. From Altamont with the Rolling Stones, Cincinnati with the Who, Roskilde with Pearl Jam and Australia with Limp Bizkit, it tends to be with hard, aggressive music. I love [that] music and I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with aggressive concerts, but you do tend to have more security concerns with concerts that are based around more aggressive bands. I can't imagine kids stage diving and slam dancing to "So Fresh, So Clean" by Outkast. They will probably just want to dance all night.
MTV: Is there any act on this tour that you are especially excited to see?
Moby: I'm really lucky because with this bill, I like everything on it. It would be hard to say that I really like one act or DJ. I would say that I'm really excited to see Outkast every night, because they put on a really great show. But I've been a fan of New Order since [I was] young and I really like Nelly Furtado and the Roots. I [also] really like Incubus, so I'm kinda looking forward to seeing everybody. DJ-wise and dance-wise, we have a really great collection of talent. It's funny because some of the DJ's we have, like Carl Cox or Timo Maas, are people [who are household names in] Europe. If we had our DJ lineup in Europe, that would sell out the show in an instant.
MTV: I imagine your recent success helped make Area:One a reality. How else has the popularity of Play changed your life?
Moby: The success of Play has changed my life a little bit. But I still live in the same home and eat in the same restaurants and have the same little bedroom studio I work in. [I] have the same friends, go to the same movie theaters. My life isn't all that different. The only difference is sometimes I go down the street and people occasionally recognize me. Before I would go out with my friends and do stupid things and no one would notice.
MTV: But now the daily papers write about you ...
Moby: Now, I go out and do something dumb and it gets reported in gossip columns. Usually it gets reported erroneously. I went to a party on the roof of a hotel [that was] sponsored by the Finnish consulate. There [was] a sauna up there. I went up for five minutes, hung out and left. Two weeks later, the New York Post ran this story about me being naked in a sauna on the roof of a hotel. Then, the U.K. tabloids got a hold of it and turned it into me being naked on my roof with a bunch of Finnish people and the police came and I got arrested. ... So, from spending five minutes on the roof of a hotel ... all I'm saying is that people shouldn't believe everything that they read in gossip columns.
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