It’s not hard to be jealous of Wesley Pentz. The man with a Diplodocus tattooed on his forearm and the swagger to match that prehistoric motherfucker has created his own niche empire in the dance music, the likes of which usually only occur in France or Germany. The man who brought M.I.A. to the masses and destroyed kidneys with the bass drops of Major Lazer now heads up his Mad Decent label, which scours the back alleys of British dubstep and the dusty streets of Jamaican reggae for the underground’s freshest sounds. And with his Heaps Decent project, run in conjunction with DJ Levins right here in Australia, he matches superstar producers with local at-risk youth in the best community program our government never thought of. Organically and frenetically, Diplo has become one of the world’s foremost sources of breaking tunes.
But he’s a great source of breaking news, too. A prolific tweeter who was once voted one of the top star social networkers in the music world alongside Kanye West, Diplo uses and abuses the medium the way a dancehall DJ only knows how; by leaving tags everywhere. While waiting to be connected to this interview (which occurred a week before the man arrived in town for Parklife), we find out that he wishes he was at a Slayer concert happening in his town right now and that he’s doing a track with Skrillex. Possibly.
Previously he’s tweeted about being on ecstasy, getting laid and (randomly) being arrested to a readership of nearly 300,000 people. His feed reads like a rollcall of everyone you should listen to, with shout-outs to A-Trak, Santigold, Calvin Harris, Bag Raiders and Benga. A true global citizen, he can’t wait to hang out with ‘Aussie cunts and bogans’ and cites Parklife as one of his favourite festival gigs in the world.
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TheVine: So this year [at Parklife] you’re doing your own set rather than a Major Lazer one?
Exactly right. It’s just me.I’m doing Parklife just as Diplo, like a headlining DJ set.
Oh that’s a shame. I really liked the [Major Lazer] dancers.
We’re still doing it, man! We’re obviously just did [Notting Hill] Carnival and just finished a few European festivals at the end of summer. I think we’re also hitting Austin City Limits and New Orleans – plenty of shit going on. We’re actually wrapping our second album, so that’s the main focus at the moment; getting that done, putting it out and starting all over again.
So have you gone back to get a whole lot of Jamaican kids or semi-unknowns [to the mainstream] for this new record as guests?
Being unknown is relative you know. With a lot of people and Jamaican music, their knowledge really doesn’t extend beyond Sean Paul. There’s a lot of classic reggae dudes like Elephant Man, Beenie Man and some newcomers like Mystik that don’t get as much notice…but a lot of the new record is pretty cool.
We’ve got Lykke Li on one track, we’ve got Vampire Weekend, the guys from Dirty Projectors…some other surprises. We did some stuff with the guys from No Doubt that will end up being for their album, but it was cool anyway. So it’s kind of ended up being reggae but in a really weird way, like from the future or whatever.
I’m just trying to get my head around how a band would fit in a Major Lazer context. Like when you say Vampire Weekend, do you get all four of them in there?
Well it’s only Ezra [Koenig] who sings on this vocal. And for Dirty Projectors it’s only Amber and her boyfriend [Dave Longstreth] who plays guitar who’s the main songwriter for the band. So it’s not too difficult.
That makes sense. Keeping on Major Lazer, tell me about Notting Hill Carnival. I saw some footage and it just looks insane.
Yeah well it’s probably our favourite party to do every year because we’ve done four now and just to get invited is a big honour. I mean seriously, we put like six thousand tickets online or whatever and we sell out in the first twenty eight seconds. It’s amazing. London is like Major Lazer’s second home because Switch lives there and it really is the gateway for dancehall to the rest of the world.
It’s pretty much a melting pot of everything from reggae to drum and bass to UK funky to garage, dubstep. Everything there is this cross-section of what London does and it’s all new shit. We always have our favourite guys playing there, like this year we had Kito, Lunice, Brodinski, Oneman… it’s just the craziest party. If you have a new song, that’s where you’re going to hear it.
Was it more restrained than in previous years because of what had happened with the riots?
It’s always wild for me so I’m not really sure. I heard it was 1.2 million people instead of 1.5. But nobody’s going to start a riot there. It means too much to the people, you know? That’s what it’s about.
That’s right, because it’s a very old concept, isn’t it? I mean Carnival is like an institution.
Exactly. I think it’s been going since the ‘60s or something.
Now it’s been a pretty difficult time for you guys with the passing of DJ Mehdi.
He was a really good friend of mine and since 2007 when we first went on tour we always remained close. Mehdi was the one guy I could always rely on to be at my shows when I was in town and he was such a great guy. I think A-trak and I are working on a song or something but...
I feel like I was so close to him even though we only saw each other a couple of times a year. I can’t imagine what the Ed Banger crew are going through right now. But that’s just it -- it’s so rare to have a guy that everyone loved so much. It’s wild, no matter scene you were a part of; the hip-hop scene, the house scene, the freakin’ techno scene, every country, every city, they loved that guy you know?
Absolutely. We’ve been seeing it here with some of the tributes coming out from DJs who knew him and the team from Heaps Decent, too. I mean, speaking of crews and families, do you feel like Mad Decent has become your version of that, kind of like the Ed Banger guys where it’s a core unit and you always have your friends around?
Definitely. Especially when we do block parties and stuff like that over here, but even when we’re down in Australia we all roll together. Everyone that we fuck with -- we’ve got dubstep guys, house and electro but we all work together and have such respect and admiration for each other.
We’re all just committed to putting out the best shit. It’s about being the most progressive, we don’t care about what’s popular, we make what we think is the best music. We have that real sense of pride and I think when you fuck with the Mad Decent kids, you can feel that.
It’s good that you can have such a broad spectrum of sound, too, and not have to say ‘Oh this is what people expect of us’ or ‘This is what our genre is’…
Man, we got over all that shit long ago. If it gets the kids moving no matter where they are, London or L.A. or Perth or Singapore, then you know it’s a hit for us.
Jonno Seidler
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Diplo performs at Parklife in Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide this long weekend.