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Diplo: The Death of Cool :: Dissecting the Long Tail with Diplo

By Zach Best   Photography by na

08/25/08 :: URB 155

What the fuck is cool anyway? The dude(tte)s who think they know are probably just copying Diplo...but the joke's on them: He doesn't think anything is cool. At least in the traditional sense. Is that cool? We're not sure. His label, Mad Decent makes people dance and kids have shaked their hips to his productions for M.I.A, Santogold and a gang of others. URB caught up with him in Philly where he told us what's cool. Or not.

URB: A lot of people look to you for musical inspiration, musical taste. Who do you look to for inspiration?  
Diplo: I don’t know man. I’m really happy that I’ve got a really good team right now in Philly that works really well on all the Mad Decent material. Like Blaqstarr, Boy 8-Bit, Drop The Lime and all of our crew here, and all of the kids at the Mad Decent warehouse.  It’s like a really cool family, and that’s where I’m happy that the team is going real strong.  As far as music…. Everyone that’s on the label and in our crew has always been real influential for me.  

So is it looking inwards at what’s going on around you that inspires you to be better?
Yeah and it’s not just us. It’s Mad Decent, it’s Fools Gold, Unruly. All of the labels on the East Coast are just doing cool shit. And all of us are like friendly competitors.

Before you were at this point in your career—before Hollertronix and the label—was there anyone whose career you looked to emulate?
Diplo: Not really. Everything that I was doing kind of came by accident. I was a school teacher, then I was a DJ, then I was a producer, then I was producing records for people that didn’t think they were gonna go anywhere, like M.I.A., and then they went somewhere. The things just kind of changed in music. I never really had any goals, I was just waiting to find another job. And then I just keep doing it one day at a time, trying to feed myself. Now I just wanna make sure when I go away I got some music to leave the world with.

Do you see any interesting scenes emerging? Any places that you could see blowing up on a global level?
It’s just kids taking it into their own hands. Everything from the kid that got more savvy on baile funk are able to tour and interact with the rest of the world and it wasn’t like that three years ago. These kids are just like isolated. That’s happening as well in Africa. Then you have a whole new MySpace generation, like all those LA bands like the Millionaires, Hyper Crush and Brokencyde. They can have like 200,000 friends, and they don’t give a fuck about what’s cool or  have any respect for any genre or anything and they just reach out to people. And that’s all that really matters. When I got into DJing, I thought that I was the quickest form of distribution: I make a song or my boys make a song we play it that night, people are gonna get it. That was a theory, but it worked. 'Cause in the end, kids go out to parties, and no one’s listening to the fucking radio. They’re still playing “Love in This Club,” which came out like, fuck, I don’t know a year ago. After a month, songs are old for us. And then we learn from those songs and then we build something crazier.  I feel like localized, building regional scenes is the way its going.