From favela funk to dubstep and on to unadulterated US pop, there are few genres producer Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo, hasn’t grabbed and mashed up in his talented hands.
The well-regarded and animated beat maker is sitting crunched up in front of a little table, big headphones on, beavering away on a laptop covered in stickers, moving his head in time to whatever he’s playing through them like moorhens do when they’re swimming. It’s backstage at the Red Bull Music Academy party at the Notting Hill Carnival, London’s annual mega-party in honour of the West Indian immigrants who lived in this particular area of the UK capital long before Hugh Grant arrived and fell for Julia Roberts.
In 15 minutes, Diplo is due to hit the decks with Switch, the other half of his electro dancehall project Major Lazer, in front of a pumped, whooping crowd who are dancing so much, and so close together, that they appear to be one fluid being.
Cutting a fine figure in a tight-fitting black shirt with a gold tie, Diplo abandons his laptop for only 30 seconds to extend his hand to dub legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, who is due to make an appearance later in the set, and with whom he had been in the Red Bull Studio two days previously. It’s a long, affectionate handshake. A few moments later, after dashing to the side of the stage to get a snapshot of the crowd with his laptop photo booth, he steps up to the decks with Switch to give the crowd what they’ve been waiting six hours for.
Against the backdrop of colourful Major Lazer cartoon artwork, the pair start dropping everything from hard dubstep, old school jungle, Ayia Napa dance anthems and dancehall, to fast hip-hop and throbbing electronica – all united by one thing: a bassline so heavy that you can feel it in your femurs. There is a lithe, extraordinarily flexible female dancer doing her thing in front of the pair, but all eyes are on Diplo, as he gees up the crowd with plenty of ‘How you doiiiiiiing, carnivaaaaal?’ It only takes minutes before members of the crowd start throwing CDs at him – demos of their music – hoping that he might hit them up as his next protégé.
'You have to take bits from everything you do and apply them to different things' – Diplo
Given the American’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new beats and genres, their enterprise isn’t totally misplaced. Diplo has travelled the world DJing, producing and making music for the likes of Roots Manuva, Kanye West, Daft Punk, Radiohead, Gwen Stefani, Santigold, and Spank Rock and Madonna (really only scratching the surface of an exhaustive CV), and is always in demand. This November, he’ll hole up in a studio in Jamaica with Switch to work on the second Major Lazer album.
For a lot of artists, he is the conduit between the sub-terrain and proper musical success – which is, no doubt, why people are lobbing their music at him while he plays. His status may have been elevated by his relationship with M.I.A. (both working and romantic), but Diplo’s success is all his own, his ascent tied to an undying curiosity – of places and people and the sounds they produce.
“It’s a matter of being creative,” he says, rolling his drink around, his closely-cropped hair wet at the ends with sweat. “You have to take bits from everything you do and apply them to different things. I love doing the pop thing, but always try and do something cool with it, bring edgier stuff in that people might not have heard before.”
Born Wesley Pentz in Mississippi 31 years ago, Diplo (an abbreviation of Diplodocus – referencing his childhood fascination with dinosaurs) spent his formative years in Florida fixating on alligators, sea creatures, and, indeed, dinosaurs. Though hoping to become a palaeontologist, he ended up studying film at Temple University in Philadelphia instead. He took up a number of jobs to support himself after graduating – everything from after-school teaching (where, legend has it, Diplo was introduced to both Baltimore club music and Crunk by a student) to working in cinemas to, eventually, DJing.
With a burning passion for beat-making, Diplo pooled resources with DJ Low Budget to start the now quietly legendary Hollertronix. What began as a fun club night soon bloomed into fully fledged underground subculture, drawing in punters from up and down the East Coast and pricking the ears of DJs across the pond. Using the Hollertronix moniker, Diplo and Budget released a mixtape called Never Scared, which the New York Times named as one of their top albums of 2003. The Diplo sound, which skates over every genre of dance music imaginable – Dirty South hip-hop to ’80s pop dancefloor mashup – was born…
Check out Major Lazer at the Notting Hill Carnival on redbullmusicacademyradio.com
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