Porcelain

by Moby

Overview

From one of the most interesting and iconic musicians of our time, a piercingly tender, funny, and harrowing account of the path from suburban poverty and alienation to a life of beauty, squalor, and unlikely success out of the NYC club scene of the late '80s and '90s.

There were many reasons Moby was never going to make it as a DJ and musician in the New York club scene. This was the New York of Palladium; of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo; of unchecked, drug-fueled hedonism in pumping clubs where dance music was still largely underground, popular chiefly among working-class African Americans and Latinos. And then there was Moby—not just a poor, skinny white kid from Connecticut, but a devout Christian, a vegan, and a teetotaler. He would learn what it was to be spat on, to live on almost nothing. But it was perhaps the last good time for an artist to live on nothing in New York City: the age of AIDS and crack but also of a defiantly festive cultural underworld. Not without drama, he found his way. But success was not uncomplicated; it led to wretched, if in hindsight sometimes hilarious, excess and proved all too fleeting. And so by the end of the decade, Moby contemplated an end in his career and elsewhere in his life, and put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swan song, his good-bye to all that, the album that would in fact be the beginning of an astonishing new phase: the multimillion-selling Play.
 
At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, Porcelain is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one’s place during the most gloriously anxious period in life, when you’re on your own, betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you’re one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby’s voice resonates with honesty, wit, and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas.
 
Porcelain is about making it, losing it, loving it, and hating it. It’s about finding your people, your place, thinking you've lost them both, and then, somehow, when you think it’s over, from a place of well-earned despair, creating a masterpiece. As a portrait of the young artist, Porcelain is a masterpiece in its own right, fit for the short shelf of musicians’ memoirs that capture not just a scene but an age, and something timeless about the human condition. Push play.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698189171
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Moby is a singer-songwriter, musician, DJ, and photographer. His records have sold 20 million records worldwide. AllMusic called him "one of the most important dance music figures of the early '90s." He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Parking Lot, 1976: The Future 3

Section 1 Dirty Mecca, 1989-1990

1 One Hundred Square Feet 9

2 Vegan Cookies 20

3 Night Moves 28

4 Hands in the Air 35

5 Garbage-Filled Shaftway 41

6 Goat-Skin Bucket 45

7 Tic-Tac-Toe with a Chicken 56

8 L Train Conductor 61

9 Orange Sodium Light 65

10 Quarters on Needles 73

11 Bloody Skateboard Wheels 78

12 Wet Socks on the Radiator 87

13 Smeared Black Magic Marker 94

Section 2 Moby Go!, 1990-1992

14 Yams 109

15 Crossed Arms 115

16 Silver Radio 123

17 Black Lacquer 131

18 Baby Food 139

19 Giant Loop of Keys 146

20 Thin Gray Curtains 152

21 Brown Floral Bedspread 164

22 Lights Through The Trees 171

23 Yellow Hard Hat 177

24 Trillions of Miles 185

Section 3 Distortion, 1992-1995

25 Beanbag Chairs 195

26 Plywood Dance Floor 204

27 Sunburn 209

28 Monochromatic Strobes 215

29 Juniper Bush 221

30 Biology Textbook 226

31 Dental Floss 235

32 Lemon Zinger 239

33 Cracks between the Floorboards 246

34 Dust Motes 254

35 Snakes in Cages 255

Section 4 Alcohol Enthusiast, 1995-1997

36 Thousands of Leather Jackets 265

37 A Mullet the Size of a Poodle 271

38 Neon-Green Muppet Monster Fur 278

39 Ants and Thumbnails 289

40 PVC Bodysuit 295

41 Rose-Colored Lights 299

42 Wet Sweater 304

43 Sugarcane Fields 311

44 Acoustic Foam 319

45 Cheetos on the Casino Floor 325

46 Orange Jacket 330

47 Condensation on Freezing Glass 337

48 Dark Water 346

49 Eighteen Inches of Mud 352

50 Stagnant Green Water 357

Section 5 The Rave's Progress, 1997-1999

51 Oak Trees 367

52 Wedding Reception 373

53 Rain on the Skylights 379

54 Windowless Bedroom 384

55 Chair with Cigarette Burns 389

56 Melting Pools of Snow 392

57 Beige Camry 396

Afterword 405

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/15/2016
The gazillion record–selling techno rocker recalls 10 alternately absurd and rapturous years breaking into the music biz in this exuberant memoir. Beginning in 1989, when he was squatting in an abandoned factory sending demo tapes into the void, and ending with his 1999 breakout hit, Play, Moby recounts his ascent through deejay gigs at New York dance clubs, where he achieved middling success with his electronic anthems for the rave scene. It’s a story of crummy apartments, psychotic roommates, and no money—the book is a love letter to chaotic 1990s New York—and then of uninhabitable hotel rooms, muddy outdoor festivals, and stages hung with bloody goats’ heads. Moby, a Christian, vegan, and teetotaller, is a monkish anomaly at the party, and though there are episodes of excess—spinning at a swingers’ party; his own stab at public sex—his outsider status makes him a keen, clear-headed, and very funny observer of fleshpots. When he starts drinking heavily and consorting with strippers, he treats the turn neither as liberation nor descent, but as a new chapter that generates both regrets and insights. Moby’s prose is honest, self-deprecating, and full of mordant wit, and when music is playing—“My ears rang with the sound of ten thousand ravers in a field at dawn”—it shines with exhilarating emotion. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Literary. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A lovingly composed new memoir that tracks his journey from living in an abandoned factory in Connecticut to playing the hottest clubs in New York and Europe. …Porcelain reads like an intimate meditation on the various contradictions Moby has resolved over the course of his 50 years: his Christian faith vs. his hedonistic streak; his hunger for stardom vs. his retiring nature; his respect for ambition vs. his deep belief in luck. The book is also a tender ode to a vanished New York City.”—Los Angeles Times
 
 “As much a portrait of downtown Manhattan in the late ‘80s and ‘90s as it is an iconoclastic artist’s coming-of-age story, this raucous, candid memoir will fascinate the electronic musician’s many fans.”—People

“Porcelain vividly evokes a certain place and time—specifically, New York in the ’90s. It simultaneously presents a portrait of its author that’s withering in the extreme. At the same time, it offers a perfect freeze-frame of downtown New York in the Dinkins to early Giuliani years, when far more of the cherished stench of ’70s and ’80s city lingered than some may remember.”—New York Observer

“Riveting.”—Rolling Stone

“Rock memoirs rarely live up to expectations, but… Porcelain is an exception. It ranks with Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and a handful of others in recent years as a particularly incisive look at not just a life in music, but at the cultural and social circumstances that helped shape it. It is by turns self-deprecating, hilarious and moving.”—Chicago Tribune

“Moby’s Porcelain is a buoyant coming-of-age story set in the filthy, dangerous New York City of the 1990s that the musician and DJ adored. Funny, bighearted and raw.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Entertainingly gritty… A distinctive addition to the recent spate of well-written memoirs by contemporary musicians, a list that would include the likes of Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and Carrie Brownstein.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A love letter to chaotic 1990s New York…Moby’s prose is honest, self-deprecating, and full of mordant wit, and when music is playing, it shines with exhilarating emotion.” —Publishers Weekly, starred

“Ten years of Moby’s life, mostly in the decrepit, dangerous, much-loved New York City of the 1990s, a life comically overcrowded,  filthy, alcohol-fuelled, vegan, unbelievably noisy, full of spit and semen and some sort of Christianity; and often, suddenly, moving. The writing is terrific, enlivened by a bewildered deadpan humor that makes crazy sense of it all. His ancestor Herman Melville would, I think, be simultaneously revolted and proud.” —Salman Rushdie

“Full disclosure: Moby is a friend of mine, yet I had no idea that he was such a brilliant writer and storyteller. Porcelain, to me, is a classic and beautifully told bildungsroman—a young man comes to the city to find himself. And Moby tells this tale of his youth—his search for meaning and music—with gorgeous clarity, comedy, and compassion. Porcelain also serves as a history of downtown New York of a certain time, a New York that doesn't really exist anymore, but I was very happy to reencounter it here through Moby's particular and fascinating lens.” —Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

“This is one of the funniest and most accessible books you'll ever read about an erstwhile Christian/alcoholic vegan electronic music maker. Throughout the adventures and misadventures, Danish music festivals and Barbadan disasters, Moby manages to stay wide-eyed, grateful and amazed, which itself is a real gift to the reader: we feel welcome in—or just as out of place as he feels—in the world of rock and raves and clubs. He remakes the music world into the form it should be: nonexclusive, unpretentious, less about division and stratification, and more about radical inclusion. Music shouldn't exist any other way.” —Dave Eggers
 
“Raw, honest, cruel and funny, Moby's beautifully-written memoir is a pure act of bravery. He allows us to ride on his shoulder as he chases a dream through New York nightlife and the European club scene, his self-deprecating humor and unguarded nature lulling us into believing the ride will be breezy and the landing soft. Only when he starts plummeting to earth do we realize that we’ve left his shoulder and climbed into his head, where self-deprecation reveals itself as self-loathing that is chasing self-destruction. It’s a dark place with jagged edges—not the spot to ride out this kind of fall, and Moby hides not one shard of it from us. But, in perhaps in an even greater act of bravery, he also never hides behind cynicism, or distances himself from the hope, and even innocence, of his dreams. I wish my writing could be even half as honest.” —Paul Haggis
 
“Honest, funny, and sometimes raw, Porcelain is an intimate look at a life in motion. It proves that Moby writes like he plays music–with passion and precision and heart.” —Susan Orlean

From the Publisher

2016-03-02
DJ and producer Moby relives the career-defining years, 1989-1999, leading to his international breakthrough album "Play" (1999). In this entertainingly gritty memoir, the author vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the evolving and increasingly drug-fueled New York City music and street scenes in the 1990s, when neighborhoods like the Meatpacking district and Lower East Side were still the epicenter of New York cool. "By 1993, the music was getting darker and the drugs were getting heavier," he writes. "Audiences were dancing less and passing out in corners more." Moby's journey began in Connecticut—his hometown of Darien and later as a squatter living in a 100-square-foot space in Stamford—but with his rapid ascension as a cutting-edge DJ talent at hip downtown venues, he quickly established himself in NYC. With multiple high-energy electro-dance hits, he embarked on a series of international tours. Brief and frequently amusing episodic adventures in NYC and on the road drive the narrative thrust of much of the story, but the author also meditates on God, veganism, sex, and his complicated feelings about Christianity. "I understood applying ethical criteria to actions that affected other creatures, which was why I was a vegan, but I didn't understand applying ethics to sex and other actions that were consensual or self-directed," he writes. "If I got drunk and had sex in a bathroom with a stripper, was I transgressing a universal ethical code? It felt thrilling to consider that most of the Judeo-Christian ethical codes I'd been raised with were arbitrary. But when I'd been having drunken sex in bathrooms and transgressing Christian ethics, I was still thinking of myself as a Christian. And now I didn't know if I still was." While he documents numerous rave events that collectively feel redundant and somewhat tiresome, Moby's writing comes alive when delving into the creative process of producing his music. A distinctive addition to the recent spate of well-written memoirs by contemporary musicians, a list that would include the likes of Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and Carrie Brownstein.

Kirkus Reviews