All That Moby Needs Is To Be Good

Here is the story of how Moby got his second neck tattoo: In early September of 2019, on the eve of his 54th birthday, the electronic music producer born Richard Melville Hall was having lunch at the vegan restaurant in Los Angeles that he owns, Little Pine. When a pal asked Moby how he intended to celebrate, another responded with a quick quip before he could answer: "Get a tattoo."

For Moby, this declaration made in jest was an epiphany. The joke reminded him of a wedding he once attended, where a retired porn star solemnly sang the Lord's Prayer. He was struck that day by the power of the ordinary wedding vows, bold public assertions of permanent intentions. Moby was a long-single celebrity activist and a musician whose last major hit was now nearly two decades old: Why not turn his body into an animal-rights billboard?

Then and there, Moby texted his friend, the celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D, and told her he'd like to stop by for his birthday. In thick, clean letters, she stamped "Vegan for Life" on the right side of his neck, just beneath the chin, as though her tattoo gun were equipped with a caps lock key.

"My friend must have thought we'd get something small, where no one would see it," Moby recalls seven months later, speaking with me on the phone while shuffling through the halls of his home at the edge of Los Angeles' Griffith Park. "But I thought, 'What's the simplest declaration of my beliefs? How can I get that in a way that's really unsubtle?'"

I had been looking forward to seeing that tattoo for myself in April. I was going to visit Moby in Los Angeles and eat at Little Pine, set to celebrate its fifth anniversary this winter. We were going to talk about his new album, All Visible Objects, a surprisingly moving mix of many of his longtime interests. I'd ask, awkwardly, to inspect the ink up close.

Of course, that never happened. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to stretch across the United States, Moby quietly shuttered Little Pine and fired all its staff. Every few days in early April, I'd call Moby's landline in Los Angeles, and we'd talk for around an hour about philanthropy and politics, about ambient music and losing religion, about his deep desire to change the world and how he's failed to do that, including the loss of Little Pine.

The Moby that emerged during nearly four hours of conversation — a multi-millionaire at least somewhat responsible for our unsteady national acceptance of both electronic music and veganism — is perhaps more perplexed about how to do the most good in the world than you or me, in spite of or maybe because of his resources and recognition. These days, after decades of putting his ego on the roller-coaster of public perception, he wonders if he should just stop trying.

"We're all battling the human condition," Moby told me toward the end of our first call, closing a tangential loop that had connected his hatred of Newt Gingrich to his observations of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to his experience selling 100,000 records a week, as he says he did when his career was booming. "And the human condition is truly challenging for everybody. Everyone gets sick, and everyone dies. Everyone loses the things that give us meaning."

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Here is the story of how Moby got his first neck tattoo: In the mid-1990s, while touring with Lollapalooza, Moby had