Last month, Bloomsbury Academic published
Mute Records in paperback. I
co-edited this book with my colleagues Zuleika Beaven and Marcus O’Dair. It was compiled in honour of Mute Records fortieth anniversary and as a tribute to Daniel
Miller, the head and founder of the label, who acts as a visiting professor at our university. He is a great person. The new edition currently retails at £26.09,
which, while still expensive for a paperback book, makes it more readily affordable
than the hardback edition, which costs £86.40. According to the blub:
This edited
collection addresses Mute's wide-ranging impact. Drawing from disciplines such
as popular music studies, musicology, and fan studies, it takes a distinctive,
artist-led approach, outlining the history of the label by focusing each
chapter on one of its acts. The book covers key moments in the company's
evolution, from the first releases by The Normal and Fad Gadget to recent work
by Arca and Dirty Electronics. It shines new light on the most successful Mute
artists, including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Erasure, Moby, and Goldfrapp, while
also exploring the label's avant-garde innovators, such as Throbbing Gristle,
Mark Stewart, Labaich, Ut, and Swans. Mute Records examines the business
and aesthetics of independence through the lens of the label's artists.
I co-authored the
introduction and contributed the chapter on Moby, which addresses his album Play and has received some
notice in reviews. Writing for Punk and Post-Punk, Paul Hollins has described it as a ‘fascinating and important
chapter’ that raises ‘disturbing questions of “truth” and “illusion” though
Moby’s “borrowing” and extensive re-use and re-purpose, without artistic
credit, of sampled black voices of the deep South in the United States’. In her
review for Popular Music, Veronica Skrimsjö states that this chapter is
a ‘particular highlight’ and notes how I compare Moby’s use of samples to the
tradition of blackface minstrelsy. For
Skrimsjö, ‘This notion appears quite
unique, but Osborne provides a very robust and convincing argument that, should
one accept it (which this reviewer does), changes the discourse surrounding ownership
and sampling considerably’.
This chapter has a long history. Although
it is now looking back on Play from a
distance of twenty years, I began work on it when Moby’s album was still in the
charts. The first version was completed in July 2000, as an essay for an MA in
Popular Culture that I was taking at the Open University. I reworked it four
years later for a course on metamorphosis at the London Consortium. It was at
this point that I introduced the minstrelsy theme. One of the tutors, Colin
MacCabe, liked it so much that he suggested I submit it to Critical Quarterly, the journal he edits. I reworked it again and it
became my first published article. Finally (for now), it seemed apt to revisit it when my colleagues suggested compiling a book about Mute Records.
Something remains missing, nonetheless.
What none of the iterations capture is that, despite questioning Moby’s
practice, I do like some of the album.
There is a particular song on it that has always has stopped me in my tracks. I was going
through a hard time when the record was released. Moby’s ‘Why Does My Heart Feel
so Bad?’ captured my mood and helped to alleviate my pain. It still gives me
the chills. This is one of the recordings that samples black voices, however, and
it is indicative of the complexities and emotional power of popular music. While
it might be necessary and even important to highlight instances of cultural theft,
we are nevertheless all complicit in appropriation. The very act of
listening draws us into other worlds and, at the same time, encourages us to
situate those worlds within ourselves. There can be a fine line, however, between
exploitation and empathy. And that’s what Moby sets in play.
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