Moby Does Porno (and Bush)

Instead of blowing a pile of cash on a music video the usual way, DJ, producer, musician, and left field thinker Moby decided to offer a $10,000 cash carrot to aspiring and upcoming filmmakers. He launched a competition for the video for his new single, the disco-electro-pop "Ooh Yeah" (from the album Last Night), in June via his Moby Gratis site (which offers free music for independent and non-profit filmmakers). The winning entry selected by Moby, which was directed by Matteo Bernardini, was recently unveiled. On his website, Moby warns viewers, "if you're watching at work your boss might think it's porn" -- which is reason enough to give it a watch.

An outspoken political, environmental and animal rights activist, the video shows the lighter side of Moby, who spends much of his energy campaigning against serious shit, and blogging to promote his enlightened agenda, and the Democratic cause.

Shortly after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, in one of his entries Moby said, despite the tawdriness of the nomination process, that "Obama has run one of the best presidential campaigns in memory." I dropped Moby an email to find out why he thought that. He responded by saying:

Because he'd never run a national campaign and he raised tons of money and had great local field staff and stayed relatively on-point and went from being a community organizer in Chicago to the Democratic nominee for president in a matter of months.

I followed up by asking Moby if, given the confines of our current system, he thought Obama could really enact the level of change we need. He said:

I think he can, especially regarding the oil industry. There's finally the political and economic will to change our reliance on foreign oil, and I think that Obama will be able, with a Democratic congress, to pass legislation that limits subsidies to the oil industry and promotes domestic and sustainable energy production. I also think he'll be able to restore some of the rights (habeas corpus, right of public assembly, etc.) that were violently trampled on by the GOP and the Bush administration.

And, knowing the bald one lived next to the Bush compound in Connecticut in the mid-80s, I asked Moby if the Bush family made better neighbors than leaders. He told me:

They lived on a huge compound and I never saw their house, let alone them. Every now and then a big motorcade would whiz by, but that's the extent of contact that I had with them. It has always galled me, though, that people (and the media) bought into GW's 'Texan' act. His family's from Greenwich, he went to school at Choate and Harvard and Yale, he summered in Maine, and he bought his ranch in Crawford in 1990. But yet the media and the great unwashed welcomed him as a regular guy from Texas. I hope that somehow the criteria for choosing a president can be improved for the upcoming election. Having 'he'd be fun to have a barbecue with' seems like depressingly low criterion for choosing the leader of the free world. And when the criteria for choosing a president is less demanding than the criteria for choosing a plumber, well, we know we're in trouble.

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