The video for "Southside", by Moby featuring Gwen Stefani, is absolutely adorable. I'm no fan of Gwen -- her beauty is often overrated, her voice is average at best (although perfectly suitable for the simple vocal stylings of your typical ska tune), and I find her to be quite the airhead in interviews -- but she's perfect as the flirty vixen playing off Moby's straight man monotone. The video looks like it was a blast to film, as the singers practically crawl all over each other and cavort in glam gear while huge neon signs displaying their names burn brightly in the background, producing the most ABBA-esque visuals in recent music video memory. But every time I see the video, I think about Moby's career, a story that is so varied and unpredictable that it proves once and for all that truth is stranger than fiction (the same argument could be made for the career of Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim, who, ten years ago, was enjoying considerable success with Beats International, a multi-genred melting pot of then-contemporary club sounds that sounds oddly similar to Moby's music of the present, although this is surely a coincidence). Because, ten years ago, in an age when a turntable, with a second as an option, was the standard for a live rave performance, Moby would play 4619 instruments simultaneously; or seven years ago, as he headlined the See The Lights tour (one of the "true" Woodstock II's) and tooled around the country like a prima donna in his own tourbus (so as not to inhale the pot smoke from the blunts of tourmates), with his show now mostly done on DAT, a man who fufilled his Jesus and Iggy Pop fantasies by standing in a crucifix pose during "Thousand" on a nightly basis, never would I have thought, while physically embracing his sweaty body after his many crowd jumps during said shows and being quite amazed of how thin and light he was, and debating to myself as to when to let him go and thinking "this guy is the Olympic champion of techno, he is the best in the world at what he does", even though, oddly, once the visceral nature of his performance had wore off not fifteen minutes after he left stage and me and my friends realized that it was in fact Orbital who had truly showed us the way not two hours before; and particularly following the critically and commercially disastrous "Animal Rights" speed-metal period of 1997, in which I'd written Moby off faster than he could say that metal was the only contemporary music that interested him in the slightest, no, not during any of these moments would I have EVER EVER, imagined that I'd be watching him in 2001 in a big budget video wearing a white fur coat, no, never did I think that. However, while watching his performance at the MTV Europe awards, it occurred to me that his music is less recognizable on it's own merits than it is from one of the many adverts in which it is featured. If, after that ten year ride, his many fine melodies are destined to be "those songs from the ____ commercials", then that's a bit sad.