Play

The slump before Play was public. Animal Rights, in 1996, was a guitar record built from the punk and metal he had loved as a teenager, and it failed. He has described opening for Soundgarden and having things thrown at him, then playing his own tour to about fifty people a night. Elektra dropped him after that album. Mute, in Britain, kept him. He started Play in August 1997 at a home studio on Mott Street in Manhattan, stopping to finish tours, and he has said he meant it as a last record. In March 1999, with the sequence done, he sat in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park and thought the release would end the career, and that he might study architecture. The basement show arrived as if that thought had been right.

Mute released Play on 17 May 1999. V2 followed in the United States on 1 June. It was Moby’s fifth album, and it did not look like a hit. He has said the first show, in the basement of the Virgin Megastore on Union Square, drew about forty people. Radio and MTV were not interested. The songs found another door, and the door was a brand.

A friend, Gregor Ehrlich, had loaned him Alan Lomax’s 1993 box, Sounds of the South. Three of those recordings became the hooks. Honey is built on Bessie Jones singing Sometimes. Find My Baby takes Boy Blue’s Joe Lee’s Rock, cut in an Arkansas juke joint in 1959. Natural Blues takes Vera Hall’s Trouble So Hard. Gospel recordings sit under Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? and Run On. The liner notes thank the Lomaxes and the historians who kept the field tapes. Moby’s label cleared the samples. Clearing a sample is a contract. It is not a cheque to the person who sang.

On 9 August 2000 the Washington Post told the story of Joe Lee’s Rock. A snippet from a night in 1959 had ended up, in the paper’s phrase, pitching corporate plastic. The performers, so far, had not received a dime. The money was pooling with lawyers and companies. Hall, Jones and Boy Blue were mostly gone by the time the album was a phenomenon. The licence had been bought from the collection. The people in the room in Arkansas were not at the table.

The phenomenon was the licensing itself. In June 2011 the Guardian noted that Play was the first album to place every track with an advert, a film or a television show, and that it had moved almost ten million copies. Wikipedia’s later tally is higher: more than 12 million copies, and platinum certifications in more than 20 countries. Rolling Stone placed the album at number 341 on its 500 greatest list in both 2003 and 2012. Fact, at the twenty-year mark, quoted David Steel at V2 telling the New York Times in 2001 that more than a hundred licences had been signed in North America alone. Porcelain went to Baileys and to Volkswagen. Wikipedia records Moby’s manager Eric Härle saying the requests came from agencies, and that more were turned down than accepted, and Barry Taylor remembering a small celebration when a British television programme asked for 7, the last track nobody had licensed yet. Necessity became a method, and then it became other people’s method.

Honey still opens like a hand on a shoulder. Natural Blues still feels like a choir left in a small room with a drum machine. The beauty is not in dispute, and the beauty was the sales pitch. A club culture that lives on samples has to be able to say the next sentence without flinching. The sample can be cleared, the song can be gorgeous, and the person who sang it in 1959 can still have been left out of the money. Play is the album that made that sentence unavoidable, because it did the beautiful version in public and then sold it to everyone.

Sources

• Play: Mute on 17 May 1999, V2 on 1 June 1999, the Lomax box, Jones, Boy Blue and Hall, the Union Square show, Härle and Taylor on the licences.
• Washington Post, 9 August 2000: Joe Lee’s Rock, Find My Baby, and the performers who had not been paid.
• Guardian, 15 June 2011: Play as the first album to license every track, and the sales that followed.
• Fact, 15 May 2019: David Steel’s figure of more than 100 North American licences, and Porcelain in the Baileys and Volkswagen ads.