Diplo
Thomas Wesley Pentz, born in Mississippi in 1978 and raised largely in Florida, absorbed Miami bass as a teenager before founding the genre-mashing Hollertronix parties in Philadelphia with DJ Low Budget and launching the Mad Decent label in 2006. He built a career as pop's great cultural magpie, funneling baile funk, dancehall, moombahton and every corner of the global club underground into mainstream hits through Major Lazer, the Skrillex collaboration Jack U, and productions for artists from M.I.A. to Justin Bieber and Beyonce. His omnivorous, borderless approach helped define how 2010s pop and EDM raided the world's dancefloors for rhythm.
M.I.A. was the first artist Diplo produced for, and he has described the eclectic, cross-cultural jumble of her early work — dancehall, baile funk, grime, hip-hop and punk all colliding at once — as his training ground. That omnivorous, borderless instinct for stitching global street sounds into pop became the template for his entire career.
listen forPut M.I.A.'s 'Galang' next to Diplo's own early single 'Diplo Rhythm' — the same restless collision of baile-funk bounce, dancehall toasting and lo-fi electro, the sound of a producer treating every dancefloor on earth as one palette.
Diplo steeped himself in Rio's baile funk — the funk carioca sound DJ Marlboro pioneered and codified on his Funk Brasil records — while assembling early edits, the Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape and his Favela on Blast documentary. That syncopated, bass-heavy favela rhythm became a load-bearing pillar of Major Lazer's aggressive club productions.
listen forDrop an early DJ Marlboro funk-carioca cut right before Major Lazer's 'Pon de Floor' — hear how both ride a stuttering, hyper-syncopated beat and chanted crowd vocals engineered to detonate a sweaty dancefloor.
Diplo grew up in Miami on the region's booming Miami bass — the sub-heavy, up-tempo, unabashedly raunchy club rap that 2 Live Crew carried to national notoriety — and Wikipedia credits that home-grown scene with shaping his production style. The taste for rattling low-end and gleeful, party-first booty records runs straight through his own bass-forward tracks.
listen forCue 2 Live Crew's 'Me So Horny' then Major Lazer's 'Bubble Butt' — both are crude, bass-drenched booty anthems chanting a single hook over a sped-up, rattling drum-machine groove.