Talks & Entertainment

*This is a talk, not a musical performance.

Moby wasn’t an ideal fit for the New York club scene of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. In an underground world of unfettered hedonism, he was a poor, skinny kid from Connecticut, a devout Christian, and a vegan. He was a rare oddity in the New York of Palladium, of Mars, Limelight, and Twilo. But he was determined to make his way. In the process, he would learn what it was to be spat on, literally and figuratively—and to live on almost nothing. 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.

In Porcelain, Moby recounts his path from suburban poverty and alienation to a life of beauty, squalor and unlikely success. He shares memories of some of the most memorable artists to come out of New York during that time: Sonic Youth, Jeff Buckley, Big Daddy Kane, and others. Success came with excess, and it proved all too fleeting. By the end of the decade, Moby contemplated the end of things, in his career and elsewhere in his life, and he put that emotion into what he assumed would be his swansong, the album that in fact would be the beginning of an astonishing new phase in his life, the multi-million-selling Play.

Porcelain is a chronicle of a city and a time, as well as a portrait of a young artist. It’s about making it, losing it, loving it and hating it. It’s about finding your people, and your place, thinking you’ve lost them both, and then, finally, somehow, when you think it’s over, from a place of well-earned despair, creating a masterpiece. Book signing to follow.