Moby

Richard Melville Hall, known professionally as Moby, is an American musician, songwriter and animal rights activist. He has sold 20 million records worldwide.

When Eminem needed a punching bag on *The Eminem Show*, he reached for Moby—a choice that revealed more about rap's insecurity than electronic music's irrelevance. The techno pioneer, who'd already moved 20 million records globally on the strength of *Play* and *18*, got name-checked on "Without Me" with a dismissive "Nobody asked you Moby," cementing a lopsided beef that Moby barely acknowledged. That single line mattered less than what it represented: hip-hop's gatekeeping impulse against an outsider who'd actually built a parallel empire through sampling, production, and crossover appeal. Moby's electronic DNA ran through countless rap producers working in the 2000s, even if the East Coast rapper world treated him as a punchline rather than a peer.