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Moby Sees Diversity in Techno, Tolerance for All

MOBY

After a short excursion into the pop merit of the Spice Girls, Moby continues to question the everyday listener's sense of music.

M: People are idiots--I don't know why people don't allow themselves to be happy. There are so few things in the world that can make you genuinely happy, so why not just be as open-minded as possible. It drives me crazy when people dismiss things out of prejudice. You can take the same liberal college student, NPR-listening person who would consider themselves very open-minded and very tolerant, [they] would never give the Spice Girls a chance. To me that's just blatant prejudice.

We were just in Burlington, Vt., and before that Boulder a few days ago, and that type of smug liberal intolerance drives me up the fucking wall; like people who preach the virtues of tolerance unless you disagree with them. I believe so strongly in freedom of speech...for everybody. You should be allowed to represent in words whatever you want because they're words. There's a big difference between writing about child pornography and making child pornography.

Being in a place like Boulder, where there are supposedly liberal, tolerant people, once you scratch the surface, they're so intolerant. I think a lot of contemporary academic climate is the same way.

Many examples surface from the depths of Moby's experiences. He concludes with an all-encompassing maxim.

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M: Tolerance has to cut in every direction, and tolerance means tolerating people that believe things opposed to what you believe.

C: Do you take heed of what critics say about your music or your performances?

M: I do to an extent, but I try to avoid negative criticism, because for the most part, it's just hateful.

C: Hateful towards you?

M: Yeah, a lot of times it's not constructive and I certainly wouldn't prevent people from writing what they want to write...but I don't see the point of exposing myself to something that's just going to upset me and it isn't constructive. I care about it, but I don't want to read it.

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