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Chapter 1: What unconventional path did Diplo take to become a music producer?
If you want Diplo to work on songs, you're not going to get a hit. You're going to get the weird song on your album that's going to help to reinvent you.
You're going to get the song people talk about. One of the most successful men that there is in the music market.
Diplo. The man behind a string of hits.
Justin Bieber, Snoop, Usher. Three-time Grammy winner, 34 platinum records and counting. A track.
has spent 29 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. The most listened to streaming song on Spotify. I didn't know how to make pop music, honestly. I learned it from just trial and error. Like when I met M.I.A., I didn't even have a laptop. Whenever something got big, like Paper Planes, it was like completely random. Yeah, that song's crazy.
Listening back to Where You Now, when it was fully finished, we're just in the studio, me and Skrillex, we're like, oh dude, we should play that again. Lina and I did spend a lot of time on that record. I was like, damn, this cannot go out. It has to be perfect. There was a lot of versions of that song. There's like at least 100. That's crazy.
My first Billboard number one was actually this Blackpink song. I've never had one. This is crazy.
I will hold this. Are you down to talk about it?
Yeah, I can talk about it a little bit, I guess. If we have to push it out, it's cool.
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Chapter 2: How did Diplo's collaboration with M.I.A. shape his music career?
I will hold it as long as needed. The last day of BTS is today. It's like the weirdest session. It's like...
Super excited today because many know him as Diplo. Some know him as part of Major Lazer, LSD, Silk City. His friends know him as Wes, but I've learned to know him as Diplodocus.
Yeah.
I saw a Diplodocus one coming in here.
Yeah, someone gave me that as a gift and I just left it. Now it's so sun damaged, but it's starting to like mutate into something else.
I didn't know that. I always thought they were called long necks.
Yeah, well, Diplodocus means to double beam in Latin. And I don't know why I know that, but it's... So Diplodocus at one point was the largest dinosaur in the world, but then they made so many more advanced dinosaurs. There's one called Argentinosaurus. There's Ultrasaurus, way bigger ones now, but for a while it was the biggest one.
What made you decide on Diplodocus?
The name has a pretty lame story. I had this girlfriend and she had these like really like long prehensile kind of like lips. And she was like, I always looked like a giraffe when she was eating food. And then she said I had the same problem. She called me a Diplodocus. And then I was into dinosaurs. And then I got this tattoo bad when I was like 16. And it was like my logo.
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Chapter 3: What lessons did Diplo learn from producing for major artists like Justin Bieber and Usher?
16, so 17. It must have been like junior in high school, senior high school. Sick. Yeah. Yeah, probably senior high school. It was only $30 back then to get a tattoo.
Oh, wow. I don't know how much it is now. I've never gotten one.
It's expensive. All my tattoos are really bad. They're like basically biker bar kind of tattoos. They're only one color. They're a lot on my body, but I stopped getting them like a couple years ago.
So the first question I always like to ask, because I think it's a good representation of every artist is, for anyone who doesn't know who you are, what are the songs that they would know you from?
Well, I've done a lot of production for other people, but I really am proud of the things I made in my own projects. Like you mentioned a lot of the names, like Jack U, Major Lazer, Silk City. But Major Lazer, Lean On is a big record. Jack U, Where Are You Now. Recently, Blackpink, Jump. M.I.A., Paper Planes, Beyonce, one of my favorite records, All Night Long, Sia, Elastic Heart.
What else have I done?
You did Like Jenny.
Yeah, Like Jenny.
You did a lot of songs that are crazy. You did Look at Me Now.
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Chapter 4: How does Diplo define creativity in music production?
That whole era of like R&B. I became like the R&B guy for a little while in L.A. because I had met Usher through Scooter. And Scooter was... I met Scooter from Kelis. He was Kelis' manager originally. So I have his phone number saved still to this day. Kelis' manager, Scooter Braun. And... Scooter was like, I got this new gig I'm working on.
It was like Bieber, same YouTube videos and stuff like that. When I was like living in Philadelphia, Scooter was in New York. And then I had done some work with Khalees or something. I forget the whole story. Anyway, met Bieber with him and then Usher and Bieber had some kind of label situation connection.
So I was like working on Bieber's, like long time ago, I worked on his second album and then I met Usher and then, you know, Usher was going through kind of a rebrand and I had just done some, you know, interesting music in Philadelphia, like Santigold and MIA. And I think Usher was just like, let's do something cool. He brought me to Jungle Studios That's Alicia Keys Studios in New York.
And we just sat there for two days and we made the record climax. And I think he really wanted to do something unique for his voice and like weird. And that was like my, when I first started in the industry here in LA, I was always doing my own thing, like building my own projects. It's funny because me and Benny Blanco have like the exact same history. We came from the exact same place.
Like we both started like Philly. He was Virginia, but Philly was like his big city. He worked for Disco D. Yeah. And I also was like friends with this because me and Ben were going to Brazil a lot. He had a Brazilian girlfriend. I was working on Brazilian music at the time.
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Chapter 5: What unique risks did Diplo take in his music projects?
And Benny was like his intern. I had another intern named DJA and Benny and DJA were like the two interns. And I ended up hiring DJA to be like one of my interns. And Benny moved to Philly, like started working with Spank Rocks. That's like the scene I came from. And then we both signed up Dr. Luke prescription really early.
I was like an offside, like I was like a kind of like more of like a administration deal, but Benny like went full into like the LAC and we've known each other for like, shit, 20, at least 20 years. I didn't know that. Me and him like know each other from like, from back in the day. Like we would, we were like the same projects. And then he just got way richer than me. He made way bigger songs.
And I was always like the outsider thing. So back to my story is that Benny was like true blue. Like I understand pop format. Like I understand when you hear some of his records, just like three sounds, like super simple, melodic. I was always like, let me just go to Brazil and do some dumb shit. And like, let me go over here and learn about this. make weird music.
Whenever something got big, like Paper Planes, it was like completely random and by accident. I never was like, this is a pop song. It was just like, let's do something crazy. Let's put some gunshots in the song. So we came from different, came from the same place, but we went different ways. And that always was like my calling card.
If you come, if you want Diplo to work on songs, you're not going to get a hit. You're going to get the weird song in your album. That's going to help to reinvent you.
If you're watching this, there's a good chance you want to put out music, you already put out music, or know someone who puts out music. And what most people don't know, it was almost impossible to do that back in the day.
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Chapter 6: How did Diplo's experiences with Major Lazer influence his production style?
In fact, Queen had to sell their van just to record their first album. It was impossible to put out music back in the day, and when I wanted to first put out music around six years ago, It felt so complicated and expensive, and I didn't know where to start. Well, that was until I found DistroKid. DistroKid is the actual music distribution platform that I've been using for years now.
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So if and when you're ready to share your music with the world, check out DistroKid. It's had my back for over six years now. Head to the description now to check it out for yourself at a discount. And now let's go behind the wall once again.
So it's been like that. Usher was like the first thing I did. I was like, let me do something. I had an idea. Let's make, I was in a techno at the time. I was into like deep German minimal techno. So Climax is me trying to make a German, like I'm talking like Ame and like just weird.
I don't know, like even Brazilian techno, just into this like weird, deep melodic sound that didn't have anything but a kick and a hi-hat. And I was like, let's make a record. that's like that, but broke down. And you know, when you go to like a rave, you kind of like a really deep like underground, like techno rave back in the day, like melodic techno, people are just like vibing, vibing.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Diplo share about the evolving music industry?
And then like 10 minutes later, hi-hat comes in and people are like screaming for the hi-hat. Like we're so used to EDM just being like bang, bang, bang, bang. So I was like really into the sound. Like, this is so cool. It's like the climax kind of like happened so minimally and people are like so excited. So the concept of that record was like
the song never climaxes, it just like kind of goes and then the cutoff gets bigger and then it goes back down.
And the concept for that record was I had just broke up my girlfriend at the time that lived in Philly and she, I was like, we did, we kind of like, I told Usher the story, like, I kind of felt like we, the climax, me and her, like we had the top of our relationship, but it didn't, that's as far as it went. It wasn't like, it wasn't like the best, truest love of all time.
And that's kind of what the song was about. He made the video for it. I don't think he ever even sings a song. It's too hard. Cause it's all falsetto, but it became a really good song for his catalog. Cause many people show his range. So that was like what I did for people back in those days. I was like, you're not going to get a hit, but you're going to get a thought provoking, weird record.
You're going to get the song people talk about.
Yeah. I was like, I was like big on Pitchfork and then they hated me. And then I wasn't big, but that was like the thing. People like get a Diplo song. It was like the cool, the cool song.
Was there something that you did specifically when trying to make the song that is different, that stands out? Was it just like following what you think, what you liked? Or was it more just something that was... Because you knew how to make pop music, was it like, I'm going to do the opposite of all that?
I didn't know how to make pop music, honestly. I learned it from just trial and error. Like when I met M.I.A., I didn't even have a laptop. Like I was making... The reason I even got into production was that I was...
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Chapter 8: How does Diplo view the future of music production with AI?
My first production ever. I just found this out too. Cause my friend gave me vinyl like a couple of weeks ago. I was in Philadelphia was for MF doom. Victor Vaughn too. Like I was a huge hip hop band. So I was like going to SOBs in New York. I was living in Philly to see like company flow, um, Campbell locks. MF do my tour with RJD too.
Like underground, like, you know, fond alum and raucous records. I was really into like this underground new hip hop sound. And MF doom was like my favorite, like artists back then. I was like going to see his shows. I became friends with him. And this, I found, this is a vinyl. It's like not even on Spotify, but that's like the record. My first production ever is called Back End on Victor Bond.
So I just met him and traded beats. And that was what I was doing in Philly. Just like making like really shitty beats on like a shitty sampler called a, I think it was called like a Akai S20. Didn't even have, I couldn't even afford an MPC. Like I had like an SP-1200, but that was so shitty and it didn't work. I didn't even have floppy disks for it.
So just like make little sample loops and then set them off, record mixtapes with Cool Edit Pro or Acid. I was a big mixtape guy. I was a DJ guy. And then my little mashups I was making got big. And then I ended up doing this record called Fabric Live for this London club called Fabric, a big nightclub. And that became kind of popular because it was a mashup of hip hop,
Southern rap, which wasn't big anywhere but the South, but I was really into like David Banner and like Three 6 Mafia. And then I had this big party in London and then I met M.I.A. through that party and somehow I convinced her label, XL, that I was actually a producer. And they sent her to Philadelphia to work with me and I had no idea what we were doing. She spent like four days.
We didn't make one good song. We made a mixtape that became Piracy Funds Terrorism.
and that they were like this fucking sucks like we can't this isn't even an album or anything and i was like look i know how to sell these mixtapes to her i was like we can just make some money on this mixtape trust me you're popping right now you have that same single called galang let me just like these are kind of cool and one of the songs became bucky dungun which is like my first like real production that i ever did and it was like me doing a fusion of brazilian music with her voice and like dancehall
So that was what I did. And then from there on, I had to learn how to like use logic and like produce because when she came over, I was not prepared. And I was like, let me learn how to use all these programs. So I bought a computer and then I started producing from that day on.
How many songs did you make until you made Paper Planes then?
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