Post by mathangigram on Dec 28, 2015 6:35:30 GMT
With Major Lazer's third album, Peace Is the Mission, out this week, the erstwhile golden couple of music are back in the news. Is it time for a reunion? Our music writer weighs in on their tumultuous relationship.
By RESHMA B
Ike and Tina. John and Yoko. Sonny and Cher. Robert and Aaliyah. Biggie and Kim. Pop history is rife with legendary couples whose romantic and creative chemistry resulted in unforgettable musical moments—if not the most stable relationships. This week, Major Lazer released their third album, Peace Is the Mission, and another musical twosome is back in the news: Wes and Maya, better known as Diplo and M.I.A.
Sparks flew in 2004 when the DJ-producer from Florida by way of Philadelphia connected with the art student, rapper, and producer from London by way of Sri Lanka. Both started strictly underground, but they would eventually collaborate on the 2007 smash "Paper Planes," which topped the charts around the world, was featured in hit movies, and got sampled by Kanye West for the hip-hop blockbuster "Swagga Like Us." M.I.A. blew up, adding a layer of tension and jealousy that would eventually dissolve their relationship. Three days after M.I.A performed the mega-rap jam live on worldwide TV at the 2009 Grammy Awards alongside Yeezy, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and T.I., she gave birth to another man's son.
With Diplo and Maya's on-again-off-again relationship officially over, Diplo launched Major Lazer. "He went all around Jamaica telling people, 'I'm the guy who produced "Paper Planes" for M.I.A.,'" one reggae artist's manager recalls. "He got the artists to voice on these crazy tracks for him. They thought he wanted doublets for a sound system." Major Lazer, of course, went on to become a worldwide dancehall-EDM phenomenon.
While there have been rumors of breakups and flameouts since Day 1, the Major Lazer juggernaut continues to sail along to this day, most recently with the launch of a late-night cartoon series on the FXX network. Meanwhile, the public's fascination with Diplo—the only original member still in the group—grows stronger by the day. The DJ who's known for getting the girls twerking—and posting IG selfies in the weirdest positions to "Express Themselves"—can seemingly do no wrong. No longer a die-hard underground artist, he's produced tracks for everyone from Chris Brown to Justin Bieber, Usher to Britney Spears, and most recently Madonna and Nicki Minaj (who last collaborated three years ago on a track with M.I.A.). It's a striking trajectory, especially given Diplo's reaction to M.I.A.'s initial success.
In a recent interview reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of her debut album, Arular— a ground-breaking fusion of electronic dance music with global sounds from U.K. underground to Jamaican dancehall—M.I.A. revealed that Diplo was insanely jealous of her success. "He basically just, like, shat on every good thing that was happening to me," she told Rolling Stone. "I just didn't enjoy it, because if I was on a cover of a magazine, he'll be like, 'What do you want to do, like, be on the dentist waiting-room table? It's corny. Like, don't do magazines.'"
The more success Maya experienced, the worse Diplo's temper got. "When I got signed by Interscope, he literally smashed my hotel room and broke all the furniture because he was so angry I got picked up by a major label, and it was the corniest thing in the world that could possibly happen," M.I.A. said. "And then Missy Elliott called me for the first time in 2005 to work with me on her record, and I'm sure we had a massive fight about that—the fact that I was talking to anyone who was, like, popular. I wish I enjoyed it, because I had this person on my shoulder the whole time, saying, 'It's shit, it's shit, it's shit. You shouldn't be on the charts. You shouldn't be in the magazines, and you should not be going to interviews. You should not be doing collaborations with famous people. You should be an underground artist.' . . . It's only now, when I look back at it in 2015, I can see that he was just jealous and he couldn't wait to be Taylor Swift's best friend and date Katy Perry."
In a follow-up interview, Diplo's response basically confirmed M.I.A.'s statement. "Nothing she said is a lie," he told Billboard. "I was really jealous and sad and probably mad when she signed to a major label. I had a lot of control when we started, and I was really proud of the music we made. The label promised her all these people to work with, and I was like, 'But your thing is this.' I probably made mistakes in our relationship, but we made awesome music. Every time we had a fight, we made good music after."
Following a five-year hiatus, the two reunited last month for a quick photo op, which Diplo posted on his IG with the caption "Best Friends Forever." M.I.A. tweeted a different shot of the same moment—leaving hers without a caption. It wasn't clear from her photo if she was trying to hug him or, as some of her followers suggested, to strangle him.
Best friends forever miamatangi
A photo posted by diplo (@diplo) on Mar 6, 2015 at 8:58am PST
Very soon after the BFF moment, Diplo gave an interview stating that she had "apologized" to him, which spiraled into another Twitter barb, as M.I.A. posted on her timeline: "I didn't apologies, I said you owe an apology to my people."
The history of this particular comment from M.I.A. dates back to 2010, when Diplo gave some very unflattering quotes to writer Lynn Hirschberg, who published a New York Times Magazine profile of M.I.A. that left the artist so upset she infamously tweeted the writer's cell-phone number. Maya felt Diplo's remarks about her use of "the whole terrorism gimmick" damaged her credibility as a spokesperson for the plight of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka—a cause her family, and particularly her father, had been deeply involved in.
"Everybody in the media was calling me a [terrorist]," she told Rolling Stone. "It was horrible because even my friends and people in the music industry had to disown me. The pressure got so intense. The media turned against me, my ex-boyfriend turned against me and became a pawn to actually do that. . . . I haven't spoke to him since he kind of threw me under the bus with the New York Times. I don't mind if he said bad stuff about me, but to discredit and devalue what happened in Sri Lanka and with Tamil people during the war is something that is a bit disgusting. Because there were real consequences to that article, where people died, real shit happened, and people are still going through it."
If M.I.A.'s reputation was damaged by fallout from the Times profile, Diplo's star only kept rising. A year after the Times fiasco, he was the subject of a "Boys Night Out" piece in WWD that was even more damning.
"No one in my camp talks to her anymore," he said of M.I.A. "She's kind of really gone crazy." As for the political fallout from the Times profile, Diplo put the blame squarely on his ex. "Maya left herself open for attacks," he said. "She's not an easy artist to criticize because she's very left-leaning, she's progressive, she's a woman. She's good in a lot of aspects, but when it comes to die-hard, facts-on-the-ground politics, she's at zero. She's nothing. I told her at the beginning of the third record, like, do not bring politics into this. Obama's the president, for one. You just can't glamorize terrorism, it's not cool. . . . You can't hide behind that shit. But she totally did. She didn't have a plan B. I told her from the beginning, it's not going to work. And Lynn Hirschberg just ate it up. If she didn't, the critics would have ate her up anyway because the record wasn't good."
Diplo and M.I.A. met in 2004 in the East London nightclub Fabric while Diplo was DJ'ing. She had already heard his stuff, and he happened to be playing her underground 12-inch "Galang" when she walked into the place. "Besides me being a white dude from Florida and her being a Sri Lankan girl in England, everything else was the same," he told Pitchfork. "Film graduates, all the same music when we were kids, were going in the same direction right now in music, it was amazing. I always wanted to make a beat with her, but all my beats were really shitty at the time."
M.I.A. was already signed to XL Records at that point, and her debut album was basically finished. The only track Diplo had anything to do with was "Bucky Done Gun," for which he provided the loop and which was finished up by a British DJ and producer named Switch. "I self-produced most of the album with Switch, and nobody's talking about that," M.I.A. explained later to Pitchfork. "Switch doesn't really talk it up, or he's not into self-promotion like that. . . . I just wanted to set the record straight." Switch would go on to launch Major Lazer with Diplo (although they parted ways after the first album).
M.I.A.'s first true collaboration with Diplo came when she traveled to Philadelphia, losing her luggage en route, and made the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. Footage of those early sessions appears in the recent documentary F10RIDA. Their creative chemistry in the studio is obvious, and M.I.A.'s playful energy is infectious as she shouts out Diplo's Hollertronix imprint, plays with his toy dinosaurs, and flips her ski cap back and forth to the beat. "Come to Philadelphia," she says at one point, surrounded by shelves full of vinyl. "You're now entering the scene of M.I.A. and Diplo." The bizarre documentary—which has no shortage of seminaked girls—was released in January of this year, and M.I.A. wasted no time tweeting her opinion of it: "The only fresh exciting bit in this trip hop 'doc' is @ 14.14 Between the butts I'm in there with a brain saving him." She also made sure to include the link, the better to prove her point.
Looking back on that time, M.I.A. reflected on how much things have changed since then. "People really felt empowered. It was about poor people being able to make shit in their houses and have that exhibition pop up on the street, [or do things in their] rooms or at their local community center. It was really about people coming together and having a good time. I think that's, like, something to fight for," she told Rolling Stone. "It's weird—that itself has become a thing to fucking fight for, you know?" In her view, Diplo and Major Lazer now represent the antithesis of this idea. "The more you open up the world, the forces that close it come up stronger. This is why talking about Diplo is kind of important in relationship to this album [Arular], because he's associated to a concept which is global and then what he became is completely the opposite in 10 years."
The first public sign of trouble in their relationship came in 2006, when M.I.A. posted an all-caps rant on her MySpace page, noting that while she was shooting a documentary about war-torn Liberia, her ex-boyfriend "WAS GONE TO SAVE STRIPPERS IN BRAZIL COZ THEY ALWAYS NEED MUSIC TO DANCE TO." The following year, her first comment to a bewildered Pitchfork interviewer about her new album Kala was that "Diplo didn't make it." Before the journalist could catch a breath, M.I.A. went on: "Yesterday I read, like, five magazines in the airplane—it was a nine-hour flight—and three out of five magazines said 'Diplo: The Mastermind Behind M.I.A.'s Politics'! . . . I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed."
One of the three tracks that Diplo did make on Kala was "Paper Planes," which took a long time to blow up. In the meantime, Maya got engaged to Benjamin Bronfman, an environmental activist and a member of the rock band the Exit, who also happened to be heir to a billion-dollar estate. "She got famous off 'Paper Planes,'" Diplo told WWD. "She had already thrown in the towel when that record came out. Before that, she was like, 'I'm retiring. I'm going to marry this guy, fuck it.' Then 'Paper Planes' blew up and she was like, 'Oh shit. I gotta take advantage of this. I'm actually an artist now.'"
Based on a sample from the Clash song "Straight to Hell," "Paper Planes" became an Internet phenomenon, spawning countless unofficial remixes. "There was a lot of funny versions," Diplo told me for a piece in Complex. "Rick Ross did one. There was a lot of reggae versions. It was just cool. It was a really viral song that year, and I think it was fun to be a part of it." Asked whether M.I.A. had anything to do with the choice of the sample, Diplo replied: "I don't know if she'd ever heard that Clash song. But she knew who they were 100, and we actually recorded it in a studio somewhere in Brixton."
Diplo did not rule out the possibility of working with M.I.A. in the future, though he went on to say, "I don't know if she's making music at the moment." Just four months before he made this comment, M.I.A. released Mathangi, her fourth studio album and the first that Diplo had nothing to do with. "I think it would be really cool to do some stuff," he said. "I don't know what we would make . . . what kind of music it would be now. At the time, we were, like, the sound of that time. We were making music that just came out of nowhere, and I think that really mattered back then. I think now, there's a lot of people that are doing that punky vibe and stuff like that. I'm not sure where we would go next. But I'm open to anything, yeah. Always."
M.I.A., who's featured on AAP Rocky's new album, ALLA, is not on the latest Major Lazer album. But the first Major Lazer single, "Lean On," is a wistful song reflecting on a failed love affair. The video—which racked up more than 80 million views in its first month—is set in India, a place close to M.I.A.'s that she incorporates in many of her music and visuals. The Major Lazer video, featuring the Danish singer MØ, is full of traditional-looking Indian girls dancing while Diplo chills shirtless in a pool strewn with petals. In his recent Billboard interview—the one in which he claimed that M.I.A "apologized" to him—he said, "I want to find a new artist I can fight with all the time and make awesome songs with. That's Skrillex." Diplo added that he'd been considering working with M.I.A. on a Major Lazer project. "She's so awesome still, and her attitude is much better now."
There are reasons why rock-and-roll couples don't last too long. Show business has a way of exaggerating egos and accentuating even the most confident person's insecurities. Temptation and back-stabbers are everywhere, social media is always ready to catch you slipping, and the press is only too happy to facilitate mutual slaying in interviews. After all is said and done, what's left behind is the work.
"We had a real big chemistry in the studio," Diplo told Vlad TV. "We got along really well making mixtapes and making videos and making ideas and stuff like that. It's impossible to date somebody in the industry. It's really not easy. Especially when you were, like, really small like we were and it explodes. . . . We were young back then, and we were just making some crazy shit. We had no rules, so it was exciting. There's lots of issues that we had personally between each other, but all that matters is that what we did together was amazing. That's all that really matters."
www.details.com/story/diplo-mia-major-lazer
By RESHMA B
Ike and Tina. John and Yoko. Sonny and Cher. Robert and Aaliyah. Biggie and Kim. Pop history is rife with legendary couples whose romantic and creative chemistry resulted in unforgettable musical moments—if not the most stable relationships. This week, Major Lazer released their third album, Peace Is the Mission, and another musical twosome is back in the news: Wes and Maya, better known as Diplo and M.I.A.
Sparks flew in 2004 when the DJ-producer from Florida by way of Philadelphia connected with the art student, rapper, and producer from London by way of Sri Lanka. Both started strictly underground, but they would eventually collaborate on the 2007 smash "Paper Planes," which topped the charts around the world, was featured in hit movies, and got sampled by Kanye West for the hip-hop blockbuster "Swagga Like Us." M.I.A. blew up, adding a layer of tension and jealousy that would eventually dissolve their relationship. Three days after M.I.A performed the mega-rap jam live on worldwide TV at the 2009 Grammy Awards alongside Yeezy, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and T.I., she gave birth to another man's son.
With Diplo and Maya's on-again-off-again relationship officially over, Diplo launched Major Lazer. "He went all around Jamaica telling people, 'I'm the guy who produced "Paper Planes" for M.I.A.,'" one reggae artist's manager recalls. "He got the artists to voice on these crazy tracks for him. They thought he wanted doublets for a sound system." Major Lazer, of course, went on to become a worldwide dancehall-EDM phenomenon.
While there have been rumors of breakups and flameouts since Day 1, the Major Lazer juggernaut continues to sail along to this day, most recently with the launch of a late-night cartoon series on the FXX network. Meanwhile, the public's fascination with Diplo—the only original member still in the group—grows stronger by the day. The DJ who's known for getting the girls twerking—and posting IG selfies in the weirdest positions to "Express Themselves"—can seemingly do no wrong. No longer a die-hard underground artist, he's produced tracks for everyone from Chris Brown to Justin Bieber, Usher to Britney Spears, and most recently Madonna and Nicki Minaj (who last collaborated three years ago on a track with M.I.A.). It's a striking trajectory, especially given Diplo's reaction to M.I.A.'s initial success.
In a recent interview reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of her debut album, Arular— a ground-breaking fusion of electronic dance music with global sounds from U.K. underground to Jamaican dancehall—M.I.A. revealed that Diplo was insanely jealous of her success. "He basically just, like, shat on every good thing that was happening to me," she told Rolling Stone. "I just didn't enjoy it, because if I was on a cover of a magazine, he'll be like, 'What do you want to do, like, be on the dentist waiting-room table? It's corny. Like, don't do magazines.'"
The more success Maya experienced, the worse Diplo's temper got. "When I got signed by Interscope, he literally smashed my hotel room and broke all the furniture because he was so angry I got picked up by a major label, and it was the corniest thing in the world that could possibly happen," M.I.A. said. "And then Missy Elliott called me for the first time in 2005 to work with me on her record, and I'm sure we had a massive fight about that—the fact that I was talking to anyone who was, like, popular. I wish I enjoyed it, because I had this person on my shoulder the whole time, saying, 'It's shit, it's shit, it's shit. You shouldn't be on the charts. You shouldn't be in the magazines, and you should not be going to interviews. You should not be doing collaborations with famous people. You should be an underground artist.' . . . It's only now, when I look back at it in 2015, I can see that he was just jealous and he couldn't wait to be Taylor Swift's best friend and date Katy Perry."
In a follow-up interview, Diplo's response basically confirmed M.I.A.'s statement. "Nothing she said is a lie," he told Billboard. "I was really jealous and sad and probably mad when she signed to a major label. I had a lot of control when we started, and I was really proud of the music we made. The label promised her all these people to work with, and I was like, 'But your thing is this.' I probably made mistakes in our relationship, but we made awesome music. Every time we had a fight, we made good music after."
Following a five-year hiatus, the two reunited last month for a quick photo op, which Diplo posted on his IG with the caption "Best Friends Forever." M.I.A. tweeted a different shot of the same moment—leaving hers without a caption. It wasn't clear from her photo if she was trying to hug him or, as some of her followers suggested, to strangle him.
Best friends forever miamatangi
A photo posted by diplo (@diplo) on Mar 6, 2015 at 8:58am PST
Very soon after the BFF moment, Diplo gave an interview stating that she had "apologized" to him, which spiraled into another Twitter barb, as M.I.A. posted on her timeline: "I didn't apologies, I said you owe an apology to my people."
The history of this particular comment from M.I.A. dates back to 2010, when Diplo gave some very unflattering quotes to writer Lynn Hirschberg, who published a New York Times Magazine profile of M.I.A. that left the artist so upset she infamously tweeted the writer's cell-phone number. Maya felt Diplo's remarks about her use of "the whole terrorism gimmick" damaged her credibility as a spokesperson for the plight of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka—a cause her family, and particularly her father, had been deeply involved in.
"Everybody in the media was calling me a [terrorist]," she told Rolling Stone. "It was horrible because even my friends and people in the music industry had to disown me. The pressure got so intense. The media turned against me, my ex-boyfriend turned against me and became a pawn to actually do that. . . . I haven't spoke to him since he kind of threw me under the bus with the New York Times. I don't mind if he said bad stuff about me, but to discredit and devalue what happened in Sri Lanka and with Tamil people during the war is something that is a bit disgusting. Because there were real consequences to that article, where people died, real shit happened, and people are still going through it."
If M.I.A.'s reputation was damaged by fallout from the Times profile, Diplo's star only kept rising. A year after the Times fiasco, he was the subject of a "Boys Night Out" piece in WWD that was even more damning.
"No one in my camp talks to her anymore," he said of M.I.A. "She's kind of really gone crazy." As for the political fallout from the Times profile, Diplo put the blame squarely on his ex. "Maya left herself open for attacks," he said. "She's not an easy artist to criticize because she's very left-leaning, she's progressive, she's a woman. She's good in a lot of aspects, but when it comes to die-hard, facts-on-the-ground politics, she's at zero. She's nothing. I told her at the beginning of the third record, like, do not bring politics into this. Obama's the president, for one. You just can't glamorize terrorism, it's not cool. . . . You can't hide behind that shit. But she totally did. She didn't have a plan B. I told her from the beginning, it's not going to work. And Lynn Hirschberg just ate it up. If she didn't, the critics would have ate her up anyway because the record wasn't good."
Diplo and M.I.A. met in 2004 in the East London nightclub Fabric while Diplo was DJ'ing. She had already heard his stuff, and he happened to be playing her underground 12-inch "Galang" when she walked into the place. "Besides me being a white dude from Florida and her being a Sri Lankan girl in England, everything else was the same," he told Pitchfork. "Film graduates, all the same music when we were kids, were going in the same direction right now in music, it was amazing. I always wanted to make a beat with her, but all my beats were really shitty at the time."
M.I.A. was already signed to XL Records at that point, and her debut album was basically finished. The only track Diplo had anything to do with was "Bucky Done Gun," for which he provided the loop and which was finished up by a British DJ and producer named Switch. "I self-produced most of the album with Switch, and nobody's talking about that," M.I.A. explained later to Pitchfork. "Switch doesn't really talk it up, or he's not into self-promotion like that. . . . I just wanted to set the record straight." Switch would go on to launch Major Lazer with Diplo (although they parted ways after the first album).
M.I.A.'s first true collaboration with Diplo came when she traveled to Philadelphia, losing her luggage en route, and made the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. Footage of those early sessions appears in the recent documentary F10RIDA. Their creative chemistry in the studio is obvious, and M.I.A.'s playful energy is infectious as she shouts out Diplo's Hollertronix imprint, plays with his toy dinosaurs, and flips her ski cap back and forth to the beat. "Come to Philadelphia," she says at one point, surrounded by shelves full of vinyl. "You're now entering the scene of M.I.A. and Diplo." The bizarre documentary—which has no shortage of seminaked girls—was released in January of this year, and M.I.A. wasted no time tweeting her opinion of it: "The only fresh exciting bit in this trip hop 'doc' is @ 14.14 Between the butts I'm in there with a brain saving him." She also made sure to include the link, the better to prove her point.
Looking back on that time, M.I.A. reflected on how much things have changed since then. "People really felt empowered. It was about poor people being able to make shit in their houses and have that exhibition pop up on the street, [or do things in their] rooms or at their local community center. It was really about people coming together and having a good time. I think that's, like, something to fight for," she told Rolling Stone. "It's weird—that itself has become a thing to fucking fight for, you know?" In her view, Diplo and Major Lazer now represent the antithesis of this idea. "The more you open up the world, the forces that close it come up stronger. This is why talking about Diplo is kind of important in relationship to this album [Arular], because he's associated to a concept which is global and then what he became is completely the opposite in 10 years."
The first public sign of trouble in their relationship came in 2006, when M.I.A. posted an all-caps rant on her MySpace page, noting that while she was shooting a documentary about war-torn Liberia, her ex-boyfriend "WAS GONE TO SAVE STRIPPERS IN BRAZIL COZ THEY ALWAYS NEED MUSIC TO DANCE TO." The following year, her first comment to a bewildered Pitchfork interviewer about her new album Kala was that "Diplo didn't make it." Before the journalist could catch a breath, M.I.A. went on: "Yesterday I read, like, five magazines in the airplane—it was a nine-hour flight—and three out of five magazines said 'Diplo: The Mastermind Behind M.I.A.'s Politics'! . . . I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed."
One of the three tracks that Diplo did make on Kala was "Paper Planes," which took a long time to blow up. In the meantime, Maya got engaged to Benjamin Bronfman, an environmental activist and a member of the rock band the Exit, who also happened to be heir to a billion-dollar estate. "She got famous off 'Paper Planes,'" Diplo told WWD. "She had already thrown in the towel when that record came out. Before that, she was like, 'I'm retiring. I'm going to marry this guy, fuck it.' Then 'Paper Planes' blew up and she was like, 'Oh shit. I gotta take advantage of this. I'm actually an artist now.'"
Based on a sample from the Clash song "Straight to Hell," "Paper Planes" became an Internet phenomenon, spawning countless unofficial remixes. "There was a lot of funny versions," Diplo told me for a piece in Complex. "Rick Ross did one. There was a lot of reggae versions. It was just cool. It was a really viral song that year, and I think it was fun to be a part of it." Asked whether M.I.A. had anything to do with the choice of the sample, Diplo replied: "I don't know if she'd ever heard that Clash song. But she knew who they were 100, and we actually recorded it in a studio somewhere in Brixton."
Diplo did not rule out the possibility of working with M.I.A. in the future, though he went on to say, "I don't know if she's making music at the moment." Just four months before he made this comment, M.I.A. released Mathangi, her fourth studio album and the first that Diplo had nothing to do with. "I think it would be really cool to do some stuff," he said. "I don't know what we would make . . . what kind of music it would be now. At the time, we were, like, the sound of that time. We were making music that just came out of nowhere, and I think that really mattered back then. I think now, there's a lot of people that are doing that punky vibe and stuff like that. I'm not sure where we would go next. But I'm open to anything, yeah. Always."
M.I.A., who's featured on AAP Rocky's new album, ALLA, is not on the latest Major Lazer album. But the first Major Lazer single, "Lean On," is a wistful song reflecting on a failed love affair. The video—which racked up more than 80 million views in its first month—is set in India, a place close to M.I.A.'s that she incorporates in many of her music and visuals. The Major Lazer video, featuring the Danish singer MØ, is full of traditional-looking Indian girls dancing while Diplo chills shirtless in a pool strewn with petals. In his recent Billboard interview—the one in which he claimed that M.I.A "apologized" to him—he said, "I want to find a new artist I can fight with all the time and make awesome songs with. That's Skrillex." Diplo added that he'd been considering working with M.I.A. on a Major Lazer project. "She's so awesome still, and her attitude is much better now."
There are reasons why rock-and-roll couples don't last too long. Show business has a way of exaggerating egos and accentuating even the most confident person's insecurities. Temptation and back-stabbers are everywhere, social media is always ready to catch you slipping, and the press is only too happy to facilitate mutual slaying in interviews. After all is said and done, what's left behind is the work.
"We had a real big chemistry in the studio," Diplo told Vlad TV. "We got along really well making mixtapes and making videos and making ideas and stuff like that. It's impossible to date somebody in the industry. It's really not easy. Especially when you were, like, really small like we were and it explodes. . . . We were young back then, and we were just making some crazy shit. We had no rules, so it was exciting. There's lots of issues that we had personally between each other, but all that matters is that what we did together was amazing. That's all that really matters."
www.details.com/story/diplo-mia-major-lazer