I was a zookeeper, I worked at Subway for a year. Music was the one thing I could do and I decided to just go with my gut and start it from scratch, building up and up.
Born in Mississippi and raised across the southern United States, Diplo picked up much of the local culture while growing up there. His reputation and music styles reflect dirty south, crunk and Miami bass, which are now trademark ingredients of the Hollertronix output.
Additionally, world music is a strong musical influence on Diplo, especially baile funk which he encountered whilst travelling in Brazil. But his proximity to the Miami music scene exposed him to another passion and he enjoyed travelling the world in search of music rather than studying dinosaur bones.
In fact, his DJ name Diplo, short for Diplodocus a long-neck dino, derives from his childhood fascination with prehistoric animals. He has a tattoo of one on his right arm. It took him some time to find his audience working a bunch of random gigs while he moonlit as a DJ building a loyal fan base. His eclectic taste was actually noticed by London rapper M.
Diplo, shirtless in his Calvin Klein underwear ad. Diplo, shirtless, gazing into a body of water, possibly with an erection. That one made headlines. Diplo, shirtless in an unidentifiable location, his body adorned with a collection of tattoos that could fill an illegal aquarium run out of an aboveground pool in the Florida Keys—a crawfish, a shark, a manatee holding a machine gun, a turtle with a yin-yang shell smoking a blunt. The updates are tempered with captions that are genuinely funny.
Observing Diplo through this lens feels like watching someone do an extended bit about being a world-famous DJ. His life is as absurd as it is aspirational, and he leads with the absurdity. The result is a year-old man with the self-deprecating tone of a millennial woman reared on 30 Rock and the meme literacy of a Gen Z'er. If everyone on social media is performing constantly, he lets you in on that fact.
There is an authenticity to his inauthenticity. Another core tenet of the Diplo brand. I first met Diplo in Los Angeles earlier that week, at a smoothie-bowl place next door to a private celebrity gym. I had no idea what was happening inside the private celebrity gym because its frosted-glass windows concealed the horrors within, but I knew the place meant business because the signage included a mysterious anvil logo.
Diplo was there preparing for a Tough Mudder. I was initially taken aback by how normal, and even slightly tired, he looked in jeans and a long-sleeve Vampire Weekend crewneck. I would later see him walking around unnecessarily bare-chested and realize it was the shirt that was throwing me off. I couldn't find any when I went to the gym. As Diplo sipped his smoothie—spinach, banana, and almond butter plus two scoops of CBD powder—Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold, came over to our table to say hello.
He and Diplo traded notes on recent workouts that sounded like they violate the Geneva Conventions. Turning 40 didn't clarify anything for Diplo, he says, except that he had to work out a lot harder to stay in shape, which is biologically true for everyone but an especially pressing concern for someone whose torso is exposed so frequently.
Mainly, he was relieved. Census before clarifying that he meant the ages of 35 to Getting older hasn't lessened his desire to stay on top of the new, music or otherwise. His current obsession is TikTok, a social media platform for posting short videos set to music that's most popular with children born after George W. Bush's first term. I'll follow them. Talking to Diplo can feel like hanging out with that one friend who is always on, who is always performing a little bit, who couldn't turn it off even if they tried.
This performance, in some ways, functions to obscure Diplo's relentless ambition. In my mind, I'm trying to take down everybody. Not in a malicious way, but just in a way where I want to be the best at everything. Diplo's refusal to rest, his nonstop pursuit of the next thing and the next thing and the next thing after that, has obviously served him well. It's an itch he'll never be able to scratch—and maybe doesn't want to. But I never do. Hopefully I never will be. But he doesn't know it.
The sparkling water that the flight attendant dispenses is as crisp as an autumn morning in heaven's apple orchard. The aloe-infused socks that Joe, the personal photographer, hands me are as cozy as a space heater wrapped in a Patagonia fleece. The toilet seat, which is hidden inside what appears to be a padded leather armchair so that I am totally confused and slightly panicked when I first enter the bathroom, is both warmer and softer than any bed I've ever slept on.
And Diplo, well… Diplo is furious. After his Charlotte show, a mob of fans swarmed him for photos. He says they need to marshal — or cannibalise — new styles rather than merely follow them. His pop cross-pollination can work both ways. His eyes begin to roll before I have even started to ask: at what point is being influenced by something celebratory, and at what point is it cultural pickpocketing? What kind of music am I supposed to make?
There is also a sense of him mining the edginess of lesser-toured places such as Pakistan and Uganda. How does he avoid his voracious tour diary looking like cultural colonialism? How can we help build it? When Major Lazer perform in Islamabad that night, the power of partying trumps all. It is a smaller show than they are used to and it is more ramshackle: equipment keeps cutting out, security struggle to keep the VIP area in check.
Most recently, Diplo finds himself exercising his collaborative spirit and singular talent for transcending genre and cultural boundaries. With the formation of two new groups, Diplo continues his streak as a global hitmaker — LSD a psychedelic supergroup with Sia and Labrinth that was streamed nearly one billion times and Silk City the disco-influenced venture with Mark Ronson. The group recently looked to Africa for inspiration, releasing a string of collaborations with African artists like Burna Boy, Babes Wodumo, Mr.
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