You know the kind of man we’re talking about. Can’t unzip his fly to have a piss without the cold hard crunch of a gun clip being loaded by way of a soundtrack.
Plays Grand Theft Auto a lot. Loves Manga and Spike Lee and is sadly
more likely to talk about drugs than abuse them with any real conviction. These
boys love the unpredictability, the sex and the stench of the ghetto but their
University educations mean they’re unlikely to venture there much after dark.
In short, they’re a peg or two up from your average exhaust sniffer: they love
jumping in the back and flying around in your pimped out Renault Clio but they
wouldn’t know a spark plug from a butt plug. Fat Boy Slim was an early incarnation
of the beast. Keith Flint was a later model, Judge Jules even later still, whilst
Lily Allen is a version with tits and charity-shop chic. But Diplo
is a more complex proposition: a Fatboy Slim that discovered his talent not
on the back of a beer-mat in a fashionable pub in Camden but by building a decent
collection of vinyl and pitching his extraordinary wares in Ukrainian meeting
halls and private parties. Not an artist so much as an insurgent – just like
his former partner-in-crime, M.I.A. Sure, they’re not unique in the strictest
sense of the word, but post-Modernity makes that nigh impossible. The simple
truth of the matter is this: if Che Guevara was to have enlisted film and fashion
graduates rather than Cuban exiles, people like Diplo would have been the result.
Which means by and large that the sound of recoiling handguns and the bling
are kept in check and reserved for the tracks where they actually mean something
and the remixer’s approach to the tunes bears the responsibility to protect
rather than search and destroy.
For those not already in the know, Diplo is the former schoolteacher from Philly
who has been steadily gaining the trust of those who make music and those who
know how they’re going to fuck it up best; a reputation arising out of a natural
belligerence and an unusual flair for pairing one kind of sounds with another.
Heralded as the king of the kitchen sink and ostensibly responsible for popularising
the ‘mash up’ cult, his offbeat status has seen him contribute inspired revisions
of ‘Hollaback Girl’ for Gwen Stefani, ‘Stronger’ for Kanye West, ‘Reckoner’
for Radiohead and even a reconsideration of The Beatles’ ‘Twist and Shout’.
Together with DJ Low Budget, he runs Hollertronix, a club and music collective
specialising in all manner of crazy psychedelia, hip-hop, electro and stuff.
There are no boundaries, no hierarchies, no pretension and no divisions – in
fact, he’s a leveller of sorts. Just plenty of beats, plenty of downtempo and
plenty of warped Brazilian rhythms – a violence he does with sounds and a punkish
violation of standards.
‘Decent Work For Decent Pay: Selected Works Volume 1’ is one way of introducing
him. Compiled by his new label, Big Dada with the expressed purpose of showing
how consistent rather than just how adaptable he is, the tunes here all reflect
his signature style: lots of movement, lots of space, lots of rubbery buzzing
funk and lots of surplus static.
In addition to a classy Electro-Latino reworking of ‘Young Folks’ from Peter
Bjorn & John’ ‘Decent Work For Decent Pay’ includes a cracking pile of driftwood
thrown up by the likes of Spank Roc, Bloc Party, Hot Chip, Bonde do Role and
M.I.A.
Not the Hipster-elect anymore, but full-on President Hipster.
‘DECENT WORK FOR DECENT PAY: SELECTED WORKS VOLUME 1’ RELEASED JANUARY 29TH
2009