Finally Found Out Where Diplo Got the Gunshot Noises for “Paper Planes”
The first in a series of my stories that appeared in French, now online and translated into English
I have this sick fantasy in life. Touching down at CDG in Paris, sitting in Business Class and the French guy next to me is using the future tense and I’m keeping up and he says, “I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. You’re like America’s Brendan Jay Sullivan.”
And I’ll be like, “C’est moi!” and he’ll use a really complicated verb tense that I’ll totally follow along with (because I use Duolingo) and inform me that in France people actually read and discuss the stories I write. Intellectually, will be better than getting verified on Twitter.
I’ve been writing for magazines in France for as long as I have in the US. But the French have silly ideas about work and life and they don’t just automatically give everything away online. I really respect these magazines for their integrity. But here, for the first time, are my stories translated into English.
Diplo was on his way to a recording session with Beyonce when a barfight landed him in Los Angeles county jail. “She was cool about it,” the superstar DJ, producer, label mogul said. “We rescheduled it.”
Diplo is cool with the stewardesses on his way from Mexico City to Las Vegas where he will play at the bikini fueled Encore Beach Club. He is cool about flying to Barcelona in a three piece suit and then back to Vegas the week after before getting whisked away to Ushuaia in Ibiza and then Koln, Chicago, Slovakia. He shotguns around the world with the relentless, high-energy spirit that would be familiar to anyone who has heard his bombastic tracks.
“I’m coming from the world of bring a laptop into a studio. I use whatever I find. I’m picking up all the scraps. Making a goulash.” Diplo has no formal training in music, something that he has turned into a strength. “I was with Katy Perry in the studio and I just flat out told her. I used to be nervous telling people how little I know about music. Now I’m open with it. I learned from Usher to just be honest with people and the main thing is the chemistry.”
MIA, Robyn, Drake, Beyonce, Die Antwoord, Chris Brown, Alex Clare, Lil Wayne, Wale, Santigold, Usher, Justin Bieber, Rita Ora, Azealia Banks, Bruno Mars, PSY, Snoop Lion, No Doubt, Mac Miller. He is the hitmaker’s hitmaker.
Almost all of these connections have come from Diplo humbly reaching out, often just via Twitter. In the digital world you can directly contact any person if you both follow each other. Diplo uses this to his self-selecting advantage. If you’re cool with him and he’s cool with you, then he’s down to make something cool with you.
And yet…he’s the international globe-trotting super producer you’ve never heard of. His original songs get almost not radio play in the States. It is fitting with his ultra-cool image that he doesn’t chase any trends or do the expected. Although he is one of the kings of EDM he is disgusted with commercial dance music.
Still, at many times of the year, Diplo’s schedule is more hectic than super stars he makes hit record for. Now relocated to a posh home over the Pacific Ocean in California, Diplo is big enough to make the major stars come to him. But he doesn’t.
Most DJ’s at his level are on private planes with an entourage and a white stucco home in Ibiza (see page.___) but Diplo chooses to fly solo — no entourage, handlers or even a tour manager. He is free of all distractions so he can focus on making more new music.
Thomas Wesley Pentz — known as “Wes” to his friends — was born in Tupelo, Mississippi (birthplace of Elvis Presley). His family moved around a lot, finally settling down in the south in Florida, but quite a ways away from the glitter and dance clubs of Miami. This region is full of swamps, alligators and few jobs. Eventually he fell in with skateboarders and graffiti artists — remixing billboards and walls everywhere. He took the tag name “Diplo” (short for Diplodocus, his favorite dinosaur).
“I didn’t really have any friends. I was obsessed with music. I went to four different high schools. Swoon — the female grafitti artist you can see in the Banksy movie Exit Through the Giftshop — was the first person who told me you could leave Florida.”
Not knowing what to do in life after he graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia, he became a school teacher. “There wasn’t even the idea in America that you could become a superstar DJ. I think I’d maybe heard of Tiesto or I knew that the guy on the radio would do a night down at some shady dance club.” Then, out of the blue, a DJ cancelled on a party in California and Diplo was flown out to fill in. “I was like — what? People will pay you to play music and throw a party?” He came home and quit his job.
The ethos of graffiti culture runs strong through him — self taught, do it yourself, collaborate with someone you admire, never tag over someone unless you think you can do better than they did. Be brash. Be bold. Both the music he produces under the Diplo moniker and with Major Lazer he creates these sonic murals by taking elements of unheard music scenes and putting his gloss over the top. Then he’s touring with twelve people and a stage show. “With everything we do we never ask ‘how can we make a hit’ but ‘how can we make it awesome?’”
In English the word “decent” usually means “good enough.” But Diplo’s label’s name “Mad Decent” is Philladelphia graffiti culture slang for an impressive work of art. (On old Will Smith song “He’s the DJ I’m the Rapper” from the 1980s you can hear a pre-blockbuster Smith complimenting his Philadelphia born DJ Jazzy Jeff on a scratch by saying, “Yo, that was DECENT.”)
The past year was a mixed bag of news. His song “Pon De Floor” with Major Lazer was sampled almost verbatim to become one of Beyoncé’s biggest hits “Run the World (Girls).” But when he went to Interscope to ask for money to produce the next music video for the now-popular group Major Lazer, the superstar producer got dropped by Interscope.
Then something stranger happened.
Bauer’s “Harlem Shake” on Mad Decent got 1 billion hits on YouTube in under 40 days (half the time it took “Gangnam Style” to do so). The success prompted Billboard Magazine to start counting online views and streaming from online sources like Youtube, Spotify and Pandora in its influential Hot 100 songs list. The guys who couldn’t get a video budget now had a hit record on their hands.
“There are no rules to running a label anymore. We have, like, seven people working for us, but Interscope probably didn’t even have a record as big as ‘Harlem Shake’ last year and they have thousands working for them.”
So how does all this overnight success change the man known for maintaining his cool?
It’s all perspective. “I mean, look, ‘Paperplanes’ took years to happen. It almost didn’t happen,” he says of his first real break-through single years before with ex girlfriend M.I.A. “I had a demo of it and the label didn’t like it. But then one of M.I.A.’s dancers and some of her street friends started listening to it more and more. That got stuck on the demo CD a year later. We were fighting and didn’t finish the record.”
Still the record needed something. That Diplo spin. So he added the infectious, crowd pleasing refrain of gunshots followed by the sound of a cash register being ripped open. “Those gunshots are from [the arcade game] Streetfighter. It took two minutes to put the whole thing together.” Satisfied they’d finished the song, they turned the record in.
At the Grammy’s, however, a very pregnant M.I.A. — now married to another man — performed alongside Jay Z, Kanye and T.I. after Kanye sampled it for the song “Swagga Like Us” which did win a Grammy, earning Diplo songwriting credit. “They gave me a little gold medal like you get in a cereal box.”
Partners come and go. Diplo was cool about it when Switch, his partner since “Bucky Done Gun” with M.I.A. Left Major Lazer. “He is still a hero to me. 80% of what music is about is the mix. He’s so good with female vocals.”
“I try to be less of an asshole. I don’t talk shit (anymore).” Working with so many boldfaced names hasn’t clipped his irreverent style, but he does have one new problem when it comes to mouthing off. He later apologized after criticizing the new Daft Punk record. “I like to joke around. The main issue with being sarcastic is that if I make fun of somebody chances are I will meet them in person, which I never thought I did,” his not-giving-a-fuck attitude is, afterall, what made his brand. “I don’t have a major label and a firewall around me. I’m real person. This is what you get.”
And that’s what makes others want to work with him. “A guy like Usher is like a brand. When he’s singing, it’s like he’s doing a song in a new color that’s never been invented before. Those guys help amplify your music. It’s nice to have some success but I’m not going to get famous producing Justin Beiber, it’s just a part of my career.” For all their fame and handlers, many of these artists just aren’t cool and that’s what they hope for when they call him up. Because Diplo is cool. “I’m a symbol of legitimizing them.”
This summer Diplo will be working with 2 Chains, Chris Brown ”X”, Katy Perry, Mo from denmark, Elephant from Sweden, Wiz Khalifa and Riff Raff.
Still, even with guys like David Guetta (45) and Martin Solveig (36) on the charts, Diplo (34) is old for a DJ nowadays. “23–24 is the closing time for a DJ in the American EDM. I only started when I was 25. To tell you the truth all these kids like [up and coming DJ] Porter Robinson — they never had a job. They left school and they were DJs.”
The most exciting collaboration may be yet to come. Skrillex (AKA Sonny Moore), a young and influential DJ who owns the American dubstep scene is set to collaborate with Diplo on a new project called Jack U.
“The whole thing about me and Sonny is we have our own fan bases but we have the freedom to do anything and not turn people off. It’s a test to see how dope we can make the music.” Plus, knowing what pressure success can put on a young artist, he knows that the project will be a much needed break for Moore (25). “He also wants to have something to take his mind off of making more Skrillex stuff. There’s too much pressure. We’re doing some things to enjoy the music. We’ll have a single out before the end of the summer.”
Honestly, that’s really cool of him.
