G
IVEN THE 8,700
miles and 20-hour
flight between Los
Angeles and Mum-
bai, India, it stands
to reason that most
folks making the trek might stay for
at least a week. Diplo stayed for 24
hours. During that time he toured the
city, headlined a festival and posed for
plenty of photos with locals (which,
along with sundry other shirtless-in-
India snaps, amassed over 430,000
Instagram likes). Then he flew back
across the globe to Diplo HQ — his
house in Los Angeles’ Beachwood
Canyon neighborhood — where, on
this warm Thursday afternoon, vari-
ous members of his team stare at their
MacBooks with the focus of NASA
engineers as Diplo himself strolls into
the kitchen, sits down and declares
himself ready to be interviewed.
“I actually drove myself today to
an art fair. Can you believe that?” he
says, noting that his Tesla recently had
a software update and thus parked
itself — which he liked. “I couldn’t
answer any text messages. That’s why
I couldn’t tell you I was late, actually.”
While he is technically a bit behind
schedule, you could argue that when
you are Diplo — the DJ, producer and
all-around bon vivant born Thomas
Wesley Pentz, known as Wes to his
friends — it’s less that you are ever
really running late, and more that time
kind of reorganizes itself around you,
leaving you perpetually well-situated
on the strange and singular timeline of
your strange and singular life.
Given an Instagram feed that makes
that life look like an endless conga line
of festivals, parties, private jets and for-
eign landscapes, it may seem counter-
intuitive that Diplo even has a house
in the first place. But indeed he does,
and it is big, bright and smells like
an expensive candle. He bought the
place three years ago, when it became
untenable to run his growing opera-
tion out of a studio in Burbank, Calif.,
where Daniela Socorro, his executive
assistant, had to sit on a folding chair
in the hallway and the interns kept
stealing his clothes. With views of the
city, a patio hot tub and chickens in the
yard, the vibe in the new house veers
between regular and surreal. Photos of
his sons Lockett, 9, and Lazer, 5, hang
on the fridge (normal). The bathroom
is decorated with gold and platinum
records (less normal). In the living
room there’s a hamper stacked with
cowboy hats, including one by Gucci
(normal for Diplo).
With a tour schedule that keeps
Diplo on the road for, by his estima-
tion, 250 days a year, he’s not actually
here a lot. He can, and has, played
almost everywhere, including many
places — Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistan,
Bangladesh — most artists aren’t able
or willing to go. He’s one of the most
successful producers of the dance mu-
sic era, a careerlong tastemaker and
party-starting DJ with a hand in an
arsenal of hits — “Lean On,” “Where
Are Ü Now,” “Electricity” — that are as
recognizable in Lagos as in Las Vegas.
Over the past few years, however,
Diplo has also achieved something no
one else in the dance world has with
the same success or potency: He has
become a pop star, transcending the
genre in which he started, while stay-
ing firmly rooted in the evolving dance
landscape. In the process, he has
become a sort of pop culture mascot,
attending the 2015 Met Gala with Ma-
donna; making national headlines for
livestreaming Joe Jonas and Sophie
Turner’s 2019 wedding; performing
with Lil Nas X at the 2020 Gram-
mys. Like the title of his 2014 album,
Random White Dude Be Everywhere,
put it, Diplo’s brand is ubiquity. Thus,
random white dude be tired.
“I want to go back to bed, like, right
now,” he says, noting that the five
hours of sleep he typically gets per
night are “not enough,” that he’s fight-
ing a cold and that, for reasons he does
not elaborate on, he had a rough night.
In person, he has an affable, if not quite
overtly friendly, let’s-get-the-job-done
attitude, making progressively more
eye contact over the course of our con-
versation, during which he receives a
hundred text messages. “But maybe I’ll
sleep in tomorrow. Although I do like
to go to the gym in the morning. It’s the
only time I can. After 11 a.m., the day is
taken away from me.”
The never-ending workday that is
Diplo’s life is, at the most fundamental
level, fueled by his pursuit of anything
and everything that interests him. His
father, Thomas Pentz, a retired hospi-
tal CEO who calls his son Wesley, says
that as a kid Diplo read the encyclo-
pedia for fun, although “it would take
him a year to finish housework or
anything else he didn’t want to do.”
Jasper Goggins, the head of Diplo’s
label, Mad Decent, calls him “the
ultimate maximalist. He has lots of
ideas and just wants to do everything
all the time.”
Diplo’s knack for making art out of
all these ideas leads to his ubiquity,
which in turn drives him to explore
more, like an ouroboros in a Stetson.
It’s what led to his work as part of the
dancehall-inspired trio Major Lazer;
to his Grammy-winning turn with
Skrillex as Jack Ü; to his other Gram-
my-winning turn with Mark Ronson
as Silk City; to collaborations with the
pop elite, including Madonna, Usher,
Beyoncé and the Jonas Brothers; to
his work with Sia and Labrinth as
the group LSD; to the deep-house
output of his newish Higher Ground
label; and to the latest character in his
repertoire, Thomas Wesley, a country
music alias. Add to that projects in
film and TV; staying connected with
Mad Decent; overseeing his SiriusXM
radio channel, Diplo’s Revolution;
the aforesaid workout routine, travel
schedule and dad duties; and, well —
you’d be exhausted too.
“Literally every year I’m like, ‘He
can’t do more,’ ” marvels Goggins.
“I’ve been saying since the early 2000s
that it’s impossible to do more. He just
never stops working.”
But while Diplo sets the relent-
less pace of his existence, it takes a
sprawling constellation of agents,
managers, assistants, trainers,
photographers, publicists and other
personnel to keep Planet Diplo spin-
ning with the speed and intensity of a
Gravitron. When Diplo texts Goggins
about starting a house music imprint,
that imprint materializes. When he
wants an omelet, Socorro goes on
YouTube and learns how to make one.
When he wants to play five shows in a
day, his tour manager, Luke McNees,
charters a private plane. “I’ll literally
do everything I get offered, but maybe
[my team] is more strategic about my
presence in places,” admits Diplo.
It’s this fusion of masterful schedul-
ing, creative verve and savvy risk-tak-
ing that has made it possible for him
to not only outlive the EDM heyday
of the mid-2010s, but thrive beyond
it. With a new decade dawning and
dance music at a crossroads as indus-
try revenue shrinks and once-devoted
fans move on to dance subgenres and
other styles of music entirely, Diplo’s
diversification may be a lesson in
longevity: to stay relevant, do a bit of
everything, do it well, and make sure
both long-term fans and newcomers
understand what you’re doing. Given
the volume of Diplo and Diplo-adja-
cent output, this last part can be tricky.
“My main goal is to try and keep [all
my projects] independent, because I
don’t want them to all blend together,”
says Diplo. “But it’s hard because you
can’t control the way fans process the
stream of information you give them
about who and what you are. I can take
off the cowboy hat, but that’s about it.”
D
IPLO HAS ALWAYS
been a bit of a savant
in terms of branding,
something he learned
in part through his ear-
ly-career collaborations
with British-Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A.
“She was the game-changer,” he says.
“She understood the idea of brand like
I had never seen. Even her label once
told me that she was 10% music and
90% attitude. That was what sold.”
Extending that idea, creative
director Sara Nataf has helped Diplo
delineate projects by creating a per-
sona for each. In LSD, he’s a member
of the infamous 1970s Source Family
cult (one, says Nataf, who “ate way too
much LSD”). In Silk City, he and Ron-
son are the resident DJs of an under-
ground club. As Thomas Wesley, he’s a
psychedelic cowboy guru. “Those guys
are all an aspect of him,” says Nataf,
who is French, used to work in fashion
and became BFFs with Diplo after
meeting him years ago at a show he
was playing in Turkey.
The creative output from Diplo,
Nataf and their go-to coterie of
freelance directors, videographers,
dancers and designers in turn fuels
Diplo’s omnipresence in the live space.
In 2019 he played over 200 shows,
including a festival-closing set at
Stagecoach, where he celebrated being
the first DJ ever to play the country
event by bringing out Lil Nas X and
Billy Ray Cyrus for a hyphy rendition
of “Old Town Road.” Diplo says it was
“probably” his favorite set of the year;
his team all dressed as cowboys and
cowgirls for the occasion.
G “There’s no limit to the number of
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DANCE 2020
“You can’t control the way
fans process the stream
of information you give them.
I can take off the cowboy hat,
but that’s about it.”
—DIPLO
MARCH 14, 2020 • WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 39