After setting the tone in 1999 with Play for his commercialized career of the 00s, Moby very much indeed transcended into “the man.” Though not his version of what that meant–“cool”–so much as how Lizzy Grant intended it: a corporate musical shill. Of course, at the time when she shaded him for that, she couldn’t know that she herself would become one, starting with doing an H&M commercial in 2012, right at the outset of her own burgeoning with buzz career.
But in the mid-aughts, Del Rey was still just Lizzy, playing Lower East Side clubs the same way Stefani Germanotta had to–though apparently with less success precisely because of not fucking her way to the top, as she talks of in the song of the same-ish name on Ultraviolence. Hence, it took longer for her fame to arrive than Lady Gaga’s.
Moby, it seemed, was intrigued by this then-blonde ingenue–her “delicately perverse purity,” or some other such gross term a “poetic” man might come up with. Grant, naturally curious about the groupie life (also addressed with sarcasm on 2017’s “Groupie Love”), accepted his invitation to come to his Upper West Side apartment, where he was sure to give a tour of all five of his balconies. Afterward, as Moby tells it, their exchange was as follows:
Moby: “Will you play me some of your music?”
Grant: “Sure, do you have a piano?”
Moby: “Yes, back on the second floor.”
Grant: “Floors in an apartment? Moby you know you’re the man.”
Moby: “Ha, thanks.”
Grant: “No, not like that. You’re a rich WASP from Connecticut and you live in a five-level penthouse. You’re ‘The Man.’ As in, ‘stick it to The Man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution.”
Clearly, this was a girl who was going places. And, true to her principled manner, she did not fuck him that night, for his reputation on “the scene” for being a sex addict preceded him and she didn’t want to be just another of many. She was, after all, already in her mind, Lana Del Rey.
While Grant has a number of songs alluding to no good cads and dads, one unreleased demo in particular, recorded in 2010, stands out as speaking to the Moby archetype. Called “Party Girl (St. Tropez),” many of its elements harken back to this very description of their ’06 encounter, with Grant saucily singing, “Do you think it’s really mean/That I’m only on the scene/’Cause I want a little danger boy?/Well X-X-O but I told you so” and “You just don’t get it/You’ve already forgotten even though I just said it/Came tonight to put my work on display”–which is precisely what she did for him on that piano. If only he wasn’t so vain, he might have actually remembered the name of the song to address it in the latest installment (yes, you read that right) of his autobiography, called Then It Fell Apart. While Del Rey is just one of many celebrity name-checking anecdotes that went hand-in-hand with living in the NY of the mid-00s, Moby sounds particularly tender toward this ballsily accusatory girl from Upstate–the other Connecticut.
Still, if anyone was going to help Moby come back down to earth it was she, who would also go on to sing with further mockery in the aforementioned song, “Thinking he’s a hot shot/Pouring me a big shot/Trying to get me drunk and high/He wishes to be seen with me in his limousine/And he says we’ll have a real good time.”
Maybe they did. If nothing else, he got a story, she got lyrical inspiration. You can’t ask for more than that in an inevitably ephemeral New York relationship, really.
