Superstardom Remains Elusive for Moby

Techno’s first superstar, the artist who calls himself Moby, was poised for greatness on the release this year of his first major-label album, “Everything Is Wrong.”

When it was released last May, it seemed a virtual certainty that the artist--long respected in the rave underground--was going to make that big crossover, dazzling his existing dance audience, but also grabbing rock fans who normally wouldn’t be caught dead gyrating under a strobe light. The album--which straddles the musical worlds with hardcore, industrial numbers next to celestial ballads and thumping disco numbers--is among the most gripping collections of the year.

There’s just one problem: Moby’s may be ready for the big world, but it seems the big world isn’t quite as ready for him.

Though the artist has received plenty of accolades for his live shows, his music hasn’t even cracked the national Top 200 pop bestsellers. But more surprising, it failed to make much impact on the dance charts where Moby once ruled. Instead, with all its diversity, the album seems to have fallen through the cracks.

While it would seem Moby’s mix of styles would appeal to a wide array of listeners, it instead may be too far ahead of its time.

“I think from a genre perspective, it would be very confusing to be a Moby fan,” admitted the 29-year-old artist on the eve of his album’s release. “From an emotional perspective, it makes sense. But to be a dance enthusiast and buy a Moby album is gonna be confusing cause there’s metal tracks on there. Or to be a metal enthusiast and hear screaming disco divas is gonna [mess] people up.”

The album is a mystery to a larger rock audience (“ . . . uh, dance music is weird”), while its rockier side is too much of a mainstream deviation for underground dance fans.

Music aside, the fact that Moby will headline certain dates on Lollapalooza’s second stage this summer, that he has had high mainstream visibility via such media as Rolling Stone and that he has made declarations that he wants to be a superstar have rubbed underground dance purists the wrong way.

Moby now faces what many so-called alternative bands before him have faced: accusations of selling out. The 29-year-old, born Richard Melville Hall, has made it quite clear he wants to reach as many people as possible with his music.

Moby himself anticipated the backlash from the too-hip underground. Last May in Rolling Stone he said, “This record will probably solidify me as a sellout [on the techno scene], but I can’t worry about it. When we started out, we had the same enemies and loved the same things, but as time goes on, the dance community has gone here, and I’ve gone there. I’m an outcast, but at the same time grudgingly respected just because I’ve been doing this so long.”

Moby has been doing this a long time in dance-world terms--since 1990. His experimentation has paid off artistically and points in exciting potential directions for pop music’s future--take the inventive hybrids of Bjork and Tricky, for example. It’s just going to take time for audiences to catch up and acclimate.

Remember, it took a good 10 years for so-called alternative music to hit the mainstream.

Singing in Tongues: Forget about Billie Joe of Green Day singing in feigned British accent. Transglobal Underground, another great dance outfit that’s not getting its due, has one-upped the pseudo-punk band and featured vocals in Arabic by a vocalist who doesn’t even speak that language.

On its first U.S release “International Times,” singer Natacha Atlas croons lines in Arabic, coming off as naturally as if the Brussels native, who relocated to England in her teens, came from the Mideast.

“Sometimes I worry about what I’m singing,” says the 29-year-old Atlas in a thick British accent, “I know I’ve mispronounced stuff. But mostly, I’m comfortable with it. I worry more about if the audience will get it, because they mostly have no clue to what I’m singing about. But somehow, they know what the song was about in the end--a love song or a tormented story. They can feel it. I guess emotion is pretty basic in the end.”