shows he can perform,” says Para-
digm’s Sam Hunt, Diplo’s longtime
agent who oversees his live perfor-
mances in North and South America
and Asia. “If you’re a normal DJ, like a
bass DJ, you exist in a specific genre,
so there’s only so many festivals and
venues you can play. You’ll run out of
things during the course of the year.
But if you’re Diplo, you can play a
deep-house party or a country festival
or a pop festival or a tiny underground
basement for 35 people or the biggest
Vegas club.”
And while most DJs arrive in town
for a show, hang in their hotel room
before the set and then fly off the next
morning, Diplo is a committed sight-
seer, surfing with the locals in Ghana,
cruising on a seaplane in the Philip-
pines, getting dropped at the base of a
mountain in China. These adventures
not only satiate his wanderlust, but
serve as fodder for both his music and
another key engine behind his omni-
presence: social media.
“You follow people like Cardi B,
Megan Thee Stallion or Drake because
they’re kind of internet characters
with their own view,” says Jahan
Karimaghayi, Diplo’s head of social
strategy. “That’s where Wes, in the
last two or so years, has really taken
off, specifically with Instagram.” The
5.4 million followers of @diplo find an
amalgamation of his absurdist, self-
deprecating humor, shots of various
VIP situations and shirtless pics taken
in exotic locations. Karimaghayi says
he and Diplo measure social success
not only by likes, but by how far each
post travels. If a red-carpet photo ends
up on Vogue.com, that’s a win.
Actually getting Diplo to all those
places documented on Insta requires
McNees to perform a kind of travel-
planning jiujitsu — a mix of moni-
toring weather patterns, tracking com-
mercial flights, booking private jets,
arranging police escorts and sifting
through “about a million emails.” It’s
not unusual for Diplo to play multiple
(sometimes up to five) sets in a day.
When the windshield on his plane
cracked mid-flight on a two-set day
last August, it was McNees who told
the pilot where to land. They ended
up making both shows. “I think we all
love what we do,” says McNees. “If we
didn’t, it would probably kill us.”
Therein lies the central Diplo para-
dox: As close as he is with his team,
no one on it seems to fully understand
how he pulls all of this off. Words like
“superhuman” are floated. The crew
conjectures that it’s because he takes
such great care of himself — green
juices, exercise, meditation, the dozen
fortifying tinctures on his kitchen
counter, consultations with a shaman
— or that he just doesn’t require a lot
of sleep, that his interest in the world
simply gives him the energy to see as
much of it as he can.
Whatever it is, everyone agrees
that it’s highly unusual. “He’s not
human. I’ll tell you that much,” says
his longtime friend and sometime
collaborator Benny Blanco. “The
other day I was with him and he
microdosed LSD and then we went to
do a workout that I couldn’t do at all.
Then he went to play a show and then
he went to fly to another country, all
in the same day. I was dead after the
workout. That is Diplo.”
D
OWNSTAIRS IN
Diplo’s studio — a
dimly lit, sparsely
furnished space — he
and engineer Max
Jaeger are combing
YouTube for Dolly Parton videos.
Diplo loves Dolly.
The two are working on his forth-
coming country project, Thomas
Wesley, and Diplo is searching for the
sound of an instrument Parton used to
play. Unable to locate it, Jaeger opens
the “Nashville” suite on some produc-
tion software, which puts a variety
of twangs at their disposal. They sort
through files, reviewing unfinished
Thomas Wesley songs that include
one about taking your sweetie to your
hometown so they can see who you
once were and where you can pump
gas before paying for it. It is sturdy,
catchy music that, like so many other
Diplo projects, blurs the lines between
dance, pop and the genre of origin.
Diplo bobs his head as it plays.
Thomas Pentz says that when
young Wesley and his two sisters were
growing up in Edgewater and Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., the family listened
mostly to Christian and country mu-
sic. A 2019 Instagram post proves it:
Teenage Diplo stands before a wall of
Alan Jackson posters, and the caption
reads, “for anyone who doesnt know
this about me, growing up, @officialal-
anjackson was like santa claus.”
That might be true, but the question
remains: Why is Diplo making country
music? And why now? While he has
helped usher lesser-known genres into
the mainstream — baile funk with his
2008 film Favela on Blast, dancehall
through Major Lazer, New Orleans
bounce on 2014’s “Express Yourself ”
— country-pop crossovers are no
oddity these days, thanks in part to the
template Avicii set in 2013 with his
smash “Wake Me Up!” Thomas Wesley
seems like the first time Diplo is jump-
ing on a trend rather than forging one.
And while he has thrown himself into
it with the dedication of a Method
actor (see: all those cowboy hats), the
project has yet to yield a major radio
hit, the gold standard for success in
Nashville — a town with, as Diplo puts
it, “real rules.”
But at a time when Nashville out-
siders like Lil Nas X and Orville Peck
(both of whom Diplo is friendly with)
are the ones making waves, Diplo says
he’s not worried. “We’re reaching
people without Nashville giving us
the approval,” he says. “We don’t re-
ally need it. With streaming services,
you don’t need to be on the radio.
Country records go for, like, a year
to reach the charts. I’m into that. I’m
learning from that.” Indeed, “Heart-
less,” a collaboration with Morgan
Wallen, spent 28 weeks and hit No. 4
on Billboard’s Country Streaming
Songs chart last fall. It has become a
peak-time singalong anthem at XS in
Las Vegas, where Diplo maintains a
long-standing residency.
“He’s a mainstream guy that doesn’t
conform to the mainstream,” says
TMWRK executive vp Renee Brodeur,
who co-manages Diplo alongside CEO
Andrew McInnes. “So it gives these
artists he works with an opportunity
to potentially get in front of a new au-
dience, while not necessarily compro-
mising who they are creatively.”
Meanwhile, with his house-oriented
Higher Ground label, Diplo is digging
deeper into the dance scene at a mo-
ment when this “underground” style of
dance music is reaching new levels of
mainstream popularity in the United
States. He started Higher Ground two
years ago, just as house and techno
were supplanting maximalist EDM as
America’s dance genres of choice. “I’m
40 BILLBOARD • MARCH 14, 2020
DANCE 2020
Watch Diplo look back on the best moments of his career at billboard.com/videos.
Vintage suit, Stetson hat, Gucci
turtleneck, Crown collection Rolex
and rings, Child of Wild vintage rings.