Diplo has always been one of the quiet geniuses of present-day music. One who is never afraid to stray off the beaten path and strives for innovation. His collaboration, Major Lazer, which is comprised of Diplo, Jillionaire and Walshy Fire, Diplo continues to stretch electronic dance music’s boundaries. Major Lazer’s live shows have become more or less a spectacle filled with shirt twirling, stage diving, and of course twerking. Diplo has worked to set Major Lazer apart from the throngs of other dance music producers and DJs. Because as he told Huffington Post, commercialized dance music is getting, well, boring:
There’s not a lot of face to it. It’s a bunch of Dutch DJs with the same haircut. You go see a dance stage at a fucking dance festival and I’m bored out of my fucking mind. That’s not going to last very much longer, because kids see that it’s the same shit every single time.
Diplo also went on to speak about the major labels in electronic music and the way they see the electronic music scene, comparing them to his own label, Mad Decent.
…labels have no idea what’s going on anymore. They just want to jump on EDM dick — shit that sucks because they don’t feel the music but think it’s happening. We are in these streets.
It seems that the up and coming labels that cover smaller, more bizarre genres are actually more successful. Mad Decent is a label that is completely internet based and rode a massive wave of success with Baauer’s Harlem Shake:
We are a label that exists on the internet, so when something like that (Harlem Shake) happens, we know how to incubate it and make it go crazy…There are no rules to running a label anymore. We have, like, seven people working for us, but Interscope (Major Lazer’s old label) probably didn’t even have a record as big as ‘Harlem Shake’ last year and they have thousands working for them.
I strongly believe that these statements from Diplo are valid. He has an impressively accurate finger on the pulse of the music scene, both in the pop realm and in electronic music. I am happy to see Diplo standing up for what he believes is right and I applaud him for that.
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