Moby, Opinions on Nico Segal’s Intellexual

Moby

Moby became the face of techno with the blockbuster success of his 1999 album Play. He's since made several successful albums and put out his first memoir, Porcelain, in 2016. Jim and Greg revisit their 2016 conversation with Moby in honor of his latest memoir, Then It Fell Apart. They also review the debut album from the group Intellexual, made up of frequent Chance the Rapper collaborators Nico Segal and Nate Fox.

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Moby

Moby – who first appeared on the show in 2006 – arrived in New York City in the late ‘80s as a sober Christian vegan making his way through the nascent underground club scene. A decade later, he was the public face of techno, selling 10 million copies of his album Play and living a life of excess. He wrote all about his early career in his first memoir Porcelain, a book Jim compared to Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog as one of the great musical autobiographies. Now his second memoir, Then It Fell Apart is due out soon.

This week Moby speaks with Jim and Greg about the gritty but exuberant heyday of rave culture and house music – and how quickly it all ended. After a string of club hits, Moby confused some critics with the eclectic 1995 album Everything is Wrong, and alienated just about everybody with the hardcore punk-inspired Animal Rights in 1996. But 1999's Play was an unprecedented smash, which led, as Moby explains, to the traditional rise-and-fall story arc of fame and decadence.

Intellexual Intellexual

Intellexual

This week, Jim and Greg review Intellexual, a project from Nate Fox and Nico Segal. The duo, who are also a part of The Social Experiment, came up in the collaborative Chicago-based scene that nurtured Chance The Rapper, and have worked with hip hop artists like Kanye West and Frank Ocean. This project, however, finds Nate and Nico attempting a singer-songwriter vibe a'la Carly Simon and James Taylor. Greg thinks that Intellexual is a project that defies genre categorization: in just one track ("Popstar") they employ footwork  electronic sounds, classical strings, and jazz trumpet. It's a debut that Jim calls a multi-hyphenate "complete joyride."

Greg

This week, Greg is taking a trip to put a quarter in the desert island jukebox and play a song he can't live without! In March of 2019, the singer and songwriter Scott Walker died at age 76. Recently, Greg spoke with members of the experimental metal band Sunn 0))) who reflected on their unusual collaboration with Walker, who began his career doing blue-eyed soul and somehow towards the end did a song that mentioned both Elvis's twin and 9/11. Greg chose the song "The Seventh Seal" off Walker's 1969 album Scott 4. The song is a reference to the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film of the same name. It deals with a knight who gets in a chess match with Death and unfortunately doesn't come out on top.

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