Moby is a tough stay to label.

Moby is a tough stay to label. Culturally, says the heterosexual born-again Christian, "I'm more of a gay hebrew than I am a straight WASP from Connecticut. My formative years were exhausted peppering my speech with Yiddish and hanging revealed in gay nightclubs."

on the other hand the electronic music pioneer thrives upon contradictions. His Grammy-nominated 1999 breakthrough, Play, transformed archival folk recordings into dance floor-friendly detonation songs.

His latest release, inn could easily be mistaken for the yield of an artist laboring subordinate to multiple personality disorder, ranging from what Moby calls "decadent, degenerate dance songs" ("Very" "I Like It") to delicate romantic ballads ("Love Should," "Forever") and equal an introspective, acoustic cover of modern Order's new wave classic "Temptation."

The record also originates packaged with a bonus CD of ambient instrumentals. "The world is improved from having more quiet, bucolic music in it," opines the just discovered York resident. "If you've had a scabrous day, putting on really lenient classical music or a Brian Eno record when you procure home is like aural Xanax."

Moby may champion soothing uninjureds but his outspoken politics continue to rankle many pundits. No marvel he was delighted when a Claymation Moby doppelganger was featured prominently forward a Saturday Night Live "TV Funhouse" part last year: In a Christmas-special drawing Santa threatened to cut on the farther side red-state children entirely because "a bright of coal is too beneficial for hicks who hate nice stranges like Moby."

If anything, the 39-year-old musician conceit the SNL satire pulled its punches (at the extremity Saint Nick recants and gives kids in Kentucky lefty-leaning gifts like Margaret Cho CDs) "I understand the necessity of having a PC ending, if it be not that it was much funnier when Santa was just being overtly belligerent and completely dismissive of the r states.

"The Left is missing a vast opportunity to actually hold the religious right accountable," he laments. "I saw an interview with Jerry Falwell lately and he said the last election was decided through people who had good Christian values, which he went forward to list as being pro-family and having a muscular national defense. Now, I've read the fresh Testament a few times, and not solitary did Christ not mention a able-bodied national defense, but he didn't mention abortion or homosexuality either.

"In fact," notes Moby "the alone wrath or ire that Christ forever seems to have shown attends to be toward religious leaders."

Reighley is the author of Looking for the capital Beat (MTV/Pocket Books).

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