TQ: You moved to LA last year after 25 years in New York City. I am not entirely sure why, but this feels almost like a betrayal…
Moby: Perhaps it is. But if I were to be really petulant, I would say New York is the one doing the betraying. Because the New York I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote ‘Chelsea Hotel’, it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous. And now it’s a very attractive city where hedge fund managers and wealthy Europeans spend a lot of money for food. The interesting people have been priced out to the outer reaches of Brooklyn and Queens. The same thing has happened to London as well – I find London really exciting but there’s a lot of vicious success here. Like New York, there’s a lot of incredibly successful people who feel incredibly entitled, perhaps justifiably, but I don’t want to be around viciously entitled people. I’d rather be around broken people who have a degree of humility, and just get on with their work.
…
When I was a drunk, New York was the greatest place in the world. You walk everywhere, everything is open until four in the morning, and people go to New York looking for debauchery. So you’d have all these crazy, fantastic experiences. And then I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent – and I can’t really complain because I’m sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent. So LA, well, first of all I love not being cold in January. The smug satisfaction that comes from sitting in the sun on January 15th and checking the weather in New York and London, seeing that it’s freezing cold and pissing down with rain. That’s nice, the schadenfreude of that.
