From popularizing baile funk and dancehall in the US, to working in the high production world of Justin Bieber and Snoop Dogg, Diplo is the tireless musical instigator. With a second Major Lazer album about to drop, followed by his project with the newly- christened Snoop Lion, DJ Mag USA entered his whirlwind world to talk about credibility, living in
the moment and sex... Words: IAN MCQUAID
B
link and you missed it. Sometime between 2004 and 2013, Thomas Wesley ‘Diplo’ Pentz went from soundtracking hipster parties and firing obnoxious barbs at pop stars on Twitter to writing
mega hits for pop stars and soundtracking everything, everywhere. His Twitter followers — all 900,000 of ‘em (equivalent to a third of the entire population of Jamaica, fact fans) — know that he’s everywhere, because his profile tells them: “Random ass white dude be everywhere”…
In the process of hijacking popular culture as we know it, he’s charted an increasingly narrow line between underground rave chic and chart-topping rave cliché. Giving voice to the ADHD genre polygamy of the endlessly curious, endlessly consuming, YouTube generation, he’s bent the zeitgeist to fit his futurist aesthetic rather than the other way round. Former boundaries have been blurred to an indistinguishable point; whilst a Diplo pop production jerks to seismic sub thuds and whiplash snares, the outlandish bleeps and hip-hop glitches of his rave cuts gleam with the big production sheen of a Justin Bieber record. It was only a matter of time before he went ahead and actually made a Justin Bieber record. Predictably enough, when he did (on the silky- pop-plus-snare-rattle gloss of ‘Thought of You’) a bunch of his fanbase took to the internet to bitch tired old sell-out laments. And Diplo? He nonchalantly pocketed a fat stack to plow into his labels Mad Decent and Jeffries, and his turbo- charged cartoon dancehall project Major Lazer.
FEELING THE VYBZ
Now with Major Lazer’s ‘tricky second album’ — ‘Free the Universe’ — done, dusted, and ready to drop on 15th April, a reggae album produced for the newly patois chatting Snoop Dogg ready to hit stores a few weeks after, and an insane tour and promotion schedule, April is gonna be hella busy for Team Lazer. And with UK production guru
Switch gone from the set-up, this time round, the spotlight is entirely on Diplo, alongside whoever he decides to invite to the party… “Basically, I just searched people up that I really wanted, like the Haim girls, or like Vybz Kartel, people who are just legends in that world, or other people who I was just happily working with,” he explains over a cracking phone connection, waiting in Miami for a plane to whisk him off to a string of Brazilian shows. “It’s like, Ezra from Vampire Weekend had an idea, called me and said, ‘Hey, let’s do something different from my record’. And there were a few more who didn’t make the album — Pharrell wrote something that’s gonna be out as a B-side. It’s about people I search out actively, because I love how they make records, people like Wynter Gordon.”
For a man who’s often been noted as having a liberal approach to ‘borrowing’ other people’s beats, he’s also adamant that on ‘Free the Universe’ he was in charge of the writing. “Out of all 14 tracks, I wrote 10 of them, and the other four I collaborated [on] with people. I did ‘Get Free’ with Switch, and I did ‘Jet Blue Jet’ with Jools. Laidback Luke helped with Ms Dynamite on the track ‘Sweat’, and Raf Riley — he’s a really talented producer from London — helped me with my Wyclef record a bit. The rest, I put together.” Surprisingly, this control has extended as far as writing the lyrics for his rag tag Who’s Who of MCs and indie stars to deliver. “With Busy Signal on ‘Bumaye’, we kinda wrote
the idea for the song and he worked with it. Sometimes I might write a couple of lyrics, or, with Snoop Lion, we wrote the majority of lyrics on the new album. It all depends on the vibe, if I can help somebody I’ll help ‘em, and if they have the groove and direction themselves, then that’s cool with me too.”
So when he’s working with an artist like Tyga, who’s known for his ultra hardcore style (so much so that even as DJ Mag types this, thousands of Harvard students are petitioning for the rapper to be withdrawn from a planned Yardfest headline appearance), is there ever a point where Diplo has to veto a certain line? Not a chance… “I don’t really care. Tyga does his own thing and he has just like, y’know, his porno party sex stuff — and that song ‘Bubble Butt’ is a sexual song, so it works… I mean, I like sex I guess… Too much maybe.”
Speaking of controversy, Busy Signal was supposed to be hitting the road with Major Lazer, but life has intervened. “I think I started working with Busy because of his connection to the rest of the world — he’s an artist from Jamaica who travels well, he’s able to go a lot of places because he doesn’t have anything controversial following him, but he’s gone to jail now. After we recorded the record he went to jail, so it’s impossible for him to come to America now. It sucks.”
The sentence in question was two months handed down last September for skipping bail on drugs offences 10 years previously, and whilst Busy is free to play in Europe, the strict drug laws in the States specifically forbid him a visa for at least two years. Another of the Major Lazer MCs, dancehall legend Vybz Kartel, is also currently languishing in prison on murder charges. It’s these kind of discrepancies between Diplo’s high rolling lifestyle and the often brutal reality of Jamaican yard life that have led to some mutterings of discontent in the reggae scene. There is a section of artists - including Bob Marley cohort Bunny Wailer — who believe that Major Lazer, and particularly the Rasta
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