The 1990s in 10 Albums: Play (1999)
In my dreams I’m gently solving time.
By 1999, the millennium was upon us. A new phase of a thousand years of human history was about to begin, and the fact that the milestone was pretty much arbitrary (especially in an increasingly secular Western society) didn’t seem to matter: statements needed to be made. The UK government decided on the Millennium Dome, which managed to be both the most popular tourist attraction of 2000 and simultaneously a bit of a flop.
Britain’s music artists might well have stepped up, but most didn’t. David Bowie, planning well ahead, intended for a five-album sequence leading up to a vast, age-ended concert on New Year’s Eve. Just one album happened, and the album he did release in 1999 proved to be his first classicist move in a 30-year career.
At long last, one music act did step up. Said music act was Cliff Richard, with the “Millennium Prayer”.
Which very simply explains why, despite the weight of the times, very little music in 1999 carried said weight. Perhaps the exception is Moby’s Play, which, as a mix of blues, R&B and soul samples from the beginning and middle of the 20th Century and the electronic styles of the later decades, at least seemed like some kind of summation of the last 100 years — albeit not the last 1,000.
Play seems to have been semi-forgotten since around 2002, when 18’s release revealed Moby’s next move to be an identical one. Moby himself made a third stab at the mainstream with Hotel, and after its critical mauling, happily marched into obscurity. He’s now more prolific than ever, but like most music acts nowadays, you have to seek out his stuff — no more ad placements and film montages for him.
And speaking of such things, it’s also the aggressive marketing — some 900+ licenses across films, TV and adverts for every one of these eighteen songs (a historical first) which certainly contributed to the album’s current status. Eight singles, almost every viable song, given the decidedly noncommercial second half of the album, added to the sense of ubiquity. By the middle of the 2000s, everyone had heard this album plenty of times, and pop culture decided this was enough.
This is a bit of a shame. To call Play a classic album is probably overstating things — for one thing, some tracks, such as “South Side”, could probably be snipped with ease — but it has its moments. It also has that curious sort of trapped-in-amber timelessness that certain works gain when they utterly embody the spirit of their times; it’s hard to imagine Play being released any time in history prior to 1997 or after 2001.
Despite this, much of the album has a formula of sorts, particularly in the way Moby adds in layers — vocal sample, keyboard, beat, guitar, maybe second vocal sample, and the common cue that you’re in the final 90 seconds of each track, the floaty synth. It’s to his credit that the whole album isn’t this, and the exact order of the above elements are rarely repeated — but there’s a bit too much of a pattern nonetheless.
And yet, when you put Play alongside much of the sharp end of the charts in 2018, it seems like the opposite of formula (for one thing, it relies very little on lyrics). I don’t feel like I’m an old man shouting at clouds, here: whether it’s Drake, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift or Adele, there’s something about the commercial peak of popular music today that feels like a remainder; there’s no possibility, anymore, of any of the thousands of subgenres that exist going multi-platinum, because they all split the vote (so to speak). What tops the charts is what’s left once all of these tiny scenes are accounted for. We could see this conservatism creep in with rock’s extinction burst, bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes; in truth, the 1990s remain the last decade where the genuinely new could permeate everywhere, and Play, whatever its flaws, might be the last example of such a thing happening.
