My friend, and ex-colleague from my days at Us Weekly, Lori Majewski, has become Ms. Rock-N-Roll bio of late. She wrote the book Mad World, which has become the definitive primer on the New Wave bands of the 80s, as well as edited a recent special issue for Us about Prince, among other things. She’s been pals with Moby for years and just interviewed him about HIS newly released bio, Porcelain.

He was born Richard Melville Hall (he’s descended from Moby Dick scribe Herman Melville –get it?) According to Majewski, his new tome is,

“a brilliantly penned page-turner which calls to mind Patti Smith’s Just Kids in how it colorizes a New York that no longer exists. What Smith does for the city and its punk culture in the ‘70s, Moby does for the Manhattan club scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which is to say he makes readers want to jump inside a time machine and go back. Porcelain rouses nostalgia for a time before outrageously priced bottle service, when one could go dancing at Windows on the World atop the Twin Towers, and when Moby spun records for a vogue-ing Madonna in a Meatpacking District where meatpacking actually happened. Indeed, the poor DJ had to push his skateboard full of house and techno vinyl through gutters overflowing with blood en route to gigs.

Porcelain is also laugh-out-loud funny — especially when Moby’s in denial about losing his hair — and unexpectedly heartfelt, like when he watches the single mother who raised him in below-the-poverty-line conditions in suburban Connecticut succumb to lung cancer. Meanwhile, the litany of Forest Gump-y celebrity run-ins never fail to amuse, from a third-grade best-friendship with Robert Downey Jr., to Moby’s assisting on a student film starring an unknown Viggo Mortensen, to his attending a club gig for his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend: the follicly blessed Jeff Buckley.”

Sounds good, right? Lori asked him few questions for Yahoo. Here’s an excerpt…

LM: Let’s start with the title. You could have called it Go!, since the book documents the first 10 years of your career, or Play, since, well, you played a lot, musically and hedonistically. Instead you went with Porcelain. Why?
MOBY: Three reasons. One, the song “Porcelain” really encapsulated what I thought was the end of my career. There’s this moment near the end of the book when I’m listening to it and I’m convinced that nothing has worked out, that my career is over. I’m gonna have to go live next to I-95 and sleep on a futon. But also, my character in the book has enthusiasm but intense, volatile fragility, and porcelain has that quality as well — it’s white and fragile, and so am I. And then, of course, I threw up into a lot of porcelain toilets, so it kind of made sense.

LM: The hard-partying chapters are highly entertaining, for sure, but how does someone who’s in AA write through the eyes of someone who is an alcoholic?
MOBY: Hopefully, in remembering a former self, you can come at it with a bit of sympathy. Of course, you wince a little bit — you’re remembering really gross things you did in your past. There’s some shame around it, but there’s also this sympathy because you realize, for myself, at the height of my drinking and drug-taking and craziness, I really thought that this was the best way to find happiness. I didn’t know any better. I wonder if it’s how a parent feels. I’ve never been a parent, but if you’re looking at your 9-year-old, I imagine you might say,

‘I wish I could protect them from what they have to go through, but in order for them to turn into a decent adult, they have to go through a lot of hard stuff.’

But, yeah, it was very disconcerting, to be in Los Angeles, sober, sitting by the pool, drinking organic white tea and writing about being a bottomed-out drunk in Germany in 1996. I would look up from my laptop almost have to remind myself that my current life was the real one and the one that I’m writing about was the memory.

LM: …your description of the early-‘90s New York club scene suggests it was a utopia of its own. The city had its highest murder rate, hypodermic needles littered the streets, rats were everywhere, and AIDS was rampant, yet you could go to clubs like MARS and Red Zone, where you DJ’d, to dance the night away and forget all the bad stuff. Was that another part of why you wanted to write the book – to shine a spotlight on the house and techno scenes of the time?
MOBY: I had been talking to some people at a party in Bushwick, telling them my old-guy stories of what New York had been like in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and they couldn’t believe it. Because the New York of today is very, very different. So I thought,

‘Maybe it would be interesting to re-inhabit that world and write about it as an anthropologist – to write about myself, but also to write about that environment, that culture, the weirdness of it and the specificity of it.’

” Now, for better or worse, there is no such thing as underground culture, because everything is shared and disseminated globally the moment it’s created. But when you went to the Limelight, Nell’s, or MARS, you were hearing music that was only being played in those places, and you really felt you were involved in something very odd and unique. Maybe that exists today, but I don’t know if it exists in the weird, cloistered way that it existed back then.

LM: I understand you’re releasing a companion CD, Music From Porcelain. Because nothing puts you in a moment like music.
MOBY: It’s two CDs. One is the music that I made from ’89 to ’99 that’s talked about in the book; the other is a compilation of some of the records that other people have made, really focusing on early-‘90s hip-hop, house music, techno stuff. We’ve also made a bunch of Spotify playlists, because you can get 75 minutes of music on a CD but you can have 500 minutes of music on a Spotify playlist.

LM: You were very much ahead of your time, then. Another way you were was with the licensing of every song on Play for commercial use. Today, artists beg to have their music licensed, but back then, you were vilified for it. Do you think you’re the guy who pretty much retired the term “selling out”?
MOBY: Yeah. The nice thing is, I feel like that debate has largely ended, because most musicians now will do anything to get people to listen to their music and maybe even make some money from it, and that largely relies on licensing. I remember reading a quote from Jeff Tweedy about licensing music to advertisements. He had licensed a Wilco song to some commercial and his fans were outraged. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said,

‘Twenty years from now, when I’m putting my kids through college and helping my parents retire and maybe helping my sick cousin, where are you guys gonna be? Do I tell my sick cousin, my daughter, my parents in 20 years, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you because I was concerned about the opinions of people I’d never met?’’

It put it in perspective. My having licensed music definitely enabled me to have more people hear what I was doing. I won’t defend it or be an apologist for it, but I do think, ideally, you have to place it in a broader context and understand that most musicians have, at best, a couple of years where they’re able to earn a little bit of money, and they sort of have to live off that for the rest of their lives. If a musician is able to license a song, make some money, buy a house for him and his wife and daughter, and be able to put his daughter in a decent school, how can anyone criticize someone for that? When huge musicians criticized licensing, I’m like,

‘Yeah, but you’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.’

You’ve got to put it in the perspective of the person who’s just getting by. So I do appreciate the fact that nowadays people don’t really have the selling-out conversation as much because everyone understands how hard it is to make a living as a musician.“

(via Yahoo!)