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 SWITCH, half of the DJ/production team behind the demented dancehall project MAJOR LAZER, talks to JODY MACGREGOR about the concept and the character.
Like a cowboy movie, the album Guns Don’t Kill People... Lazers Do opens with its hero, Major Lazer, riding into town. He enters on sampled hoofbeats and guitar that suddenly turns surf-rock before Santigold arrives to stutter her catchy earworms directly into your short-term memory. “Vibrate like a Nokia” is the new “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Mr. Lex soon joins her and suddenly everything happens at once and then explodes. Phones ring, plates smash, air horns blast and animals sampled from computer games erupt noisily. It’s glorious.
However, there was a prequel. Before the album, a video appeared on the Internet for a track called Zumbi, which features Auto-Tuned comedian Andy Milonakis confessing to a taste for both brains and cocaine. Not appearing on the album, Zumbi was a joke track Switch and Diplo cooked up after bumping into Milonakis at a party. “It turns out that he’s a huge dancehall fan and really knows his shit from Jamaica and what we wanted to do was leak a fun record that would sum up where we were at,” Switch recalls. “Just makin’ it light-hearted and fun. By this time we already had that Major Lazer, he was gonna shoot zombies and shit. Andy just literally did that out on the fly, so we put it out as something to give people so people wouldn’t notice that we’re not leakin’ anything.”
That he shoots zombies and shit is most of what we know about the character of Major Lazer right now. Switch promises things will unfold as they release more singles from the album, explaining the story through film clips and cover art. We do know that he lost an arm in the secret zombie war of 1984 and had it replaced with a laser, which he uses to Jamaica safe from the undead while working undercover as a nightclub owner. “The concept of Major Lazer was gonna be like this fictional character that would save me and Wez [Thomas Wesley Pentz, AKA Diplo] having to put our ugly mugs on the front of a dancehall, or an essentially dancehall record, so we came up with the craziest concept we could. To make it fun he was going to be a superhero, a Jamaican superhero, which I’m not sure if it’s been done.” Well, there was Jet from the New Guardians and Shift from Genetix and I’ll shut up now.
Having two DJ/producers working together in the studio proved very productive for Switch and Diplo. “I’m a huge fan of Diplo as a DJ,” says Switch. “To have him around the studio while you’re throwing stupid ideas around is kind of cool cause he has pretty good taste and you can look over your shoulder and if he gives it a nod you know you’re not wasting your time.” In fact, it was slightly too productive and they couldn’t stop coming up with tracks even after they’d filled the album. “It’s a shame, there was a track with M.I.A. that didn’t make the album, which is actually finished now. We’re gonna release it in the next few months.”
GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE... LAZERS DO is available now on Downtown via Inertia. If you don’t look for first single Hold The Line’s toy-commercial video on the Internet you’ll regret it. www.myspace.com/majorlazer
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