Today sees the release of Major Lazer’s debut long-player, Gunz Don’t Kill People, Lazers Do. But just to get to the point where we could type out that simple sentence about the new collab between Diplo and Switch took about a half an hour of research; we’ve got an inbox crammed so full of emails detailing Major Lazer ephemera (iPhone apps, party invites, remixes of songs we hadn’t even heard the originals of, videos, downloads) that for a second there, it got real hard to tell just what the hell Major Lazer is. As it turns out, Major Lazer is music. And that music is, in a word, “dutty.” As in Jamaican dancehall “dutty,” the genre that has increasingly become the twinkle in Diplo’s eye, now that the whole B-more club sound has been pretty much run into the ground. The debut single from Gunz Don’t Kill People, Lazers Do is “Hold The Line” (see video above), which features a cameo from Santigold. Problems: We’re not sure that this isn’t merely an Anglicized, American Apparel-friendly appropriation of a kind of music that’s been around for years now, toiling in (relative) obscurity (outside of Jamaica and NYC), and well, you know how that goes. It’s the whole Elvis thing. And if we’re gonna be really honest, we feel like the Dutty Chutney guys are doing far more interesting things with this kind of music, and avoiding the whole unfortunate pantomime vibe at the same time. In any case, this might not be anybody’s problem: As we speak, the Neon Nation that once hung on Diplo’s every move is being cast to the wind by one thousand Tumblr blogs and a recession that’s making everybody get into Karen Dalton and Nigerian funk reissues anyway, because that is presumably more “real.” (No judgement there, just calling it like it is.) We’ll check out Gunz Don’t Kill People, Lazers Do in its entirety regardless, as we feel like it’s probably a more important signpost as to where Diplo is going than, you know, where he is. If you wanna check out Major Lazer in person, you can do so for free this Friday night at the Electric Factory with A-Trak at this whole free Barcardi party thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 4:22 pm.