BRAZILIAN WAX Two top d.j.s get together.
By SASHA FRERE-JONES The New Yorker | Issue of 2005-08-01 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/articles/050801crmu_music On a hot night in June, an unadvertised show by two influential d.j.s was getting under way at Rothko, a small club on the Lower East Side. Wesley Pentz, who is twenty-six and goes by the name Diplo"Just like `Delta' or `Chevrolet,' it's a word I made up," he says, though it may have something to do with the line drawing of a diplodocus dinosaur tattooed on the inside of his right forearmwas playing first. Pentz looks a little like Paul Newman and moves in the permanently relaxed manner of someone who is used to having people pay attention to him. He wore a yellow Lacoste tennis shirt with a T-shirt underneath and shuffled between several turntables and a laptop filled with mp3 files. As he played, Pentz waved to people he recognized from parties he has thrown in New York and Philadelphia with his friend the d.j. Low Budget, under the collective name Hollertronix. Since 2002, when the two began collaborating, Hollertronix's aesthetic has become the template for modish d.j.s all over the Northeast: bumping, grinding commercial hip-hop blended with unlikely samples from well-known pop songs. Pentz is a particularly talented bricoleur, who knows how to match non-American beats (Radiohead, Elephant Man) with big-selling American voices (Lil' Flip, Trina) and produce a sound that is unexpectedly fresh. When Interscope Records commissioned a remix of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl," which was the No. 1 single in the country for four weeks this spring, the company hired Pentz. At Rothko, Pentz's d.j. partner was not Low Budget but Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, a forty-two-year-old Brazilian who goes by the name Marlboro and to whom Pentz has become close, thanks to the latest in a dizzying series of cross-cultural musical appropriations that began nearly thirty years ago. In 1977, the steely, intentionally robotic German electronic group Kraftwerk released "Trans-Europe Express," a song that became a hit in black clubs in New York. In 1981, Kraftwerk released a song with an unusually heavy and thumping drum-machine beat called "Numbers," which became an even bigger hit on black radio. The following year, a group from the Bronx called Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force released "Planet Rock," a track that combined the music from "Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers" with acrobatic ensemble rapping. "Planet Rock" moves at a hundred and twenty-eight beats a minutea little quicker than your basic disco songand its urgent sound inspired a genre in New York and London called "electro," and a genre in Miami called "bass," which is distinguished by lyrics that are exclusively sexual and occasionally pornographic. (The best-known Miami bass group is 2 Live Crew, which in 1990 went to court in Broward County, Florida, to defend its right to use obscenities in its songs.) When "Planet Rock" and Miami bass records reached Rio, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, they spawned yet another genre, "funk"also referred to as "baile funk" or "funk carioca"which, confusingly, does not resemble American funk music but, rather, sounds like Miami bass fused with Brazilian singing and drumming. Da Matta is the godfather of the Brazilian funk scene, and he was standing behind Pentz at Rothko as Pentz cued up a strange song called "Bucky Done Gun"the reason that the two now play shows together. Pentz produced "Bucky Done Gun" for the British artist M.I.A.it appears on her current album, "Arular"and it consists in large part of chopped-up bits of a song called "Injeção," by the Brazilian singer Deise Tigrona, which was recorded in da Matta's studio. Both tracks incorporate a tiny sample of the horns from Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now," the theme from "Rocky," to create a stabbing, jittery effect that is both thrilling and irritating. Deise Tigrona raps in the ungainly four-bar style of nineteen-eighties hip-hop, haranguing you as though you'd broken her heart, and her body: "It is stinging but I can take it, scratching but I can take it. Ouch, doctor, what a pain, ouch, doctor, what a pain." If Pentz is the impossibly cool kid two grades ahead of you, then da Matta is your most fun uncle, the one who never married and owns three cars. He is more than six feet tall and handsome, with a wide, easygoing face. At Rothko, he sang along to every song, wiggling his hips and pointing his fingers in the air, in a style that is outdated but somehow endearing. As he worked, images from a videotape of Brazilian favelas were projected onto the walls around him. He played "Pavaroti," a popular tune by Jack e Chocolatewhich features someone imitating Luciano Pavarotti and sounds a bit like Elmer Fudd performing "The Barber of Seville"and two tracks that sample James Brown. The songs percolated with an innocent sexuality, as though Marlboro were performing not at a night club but at a slumber party for teen-age girls, and as the tempo sank into the dancers' bodies everyone on the floor started moving in unison. Baile funk strikes a balance that all good dance music strives to achieve: between the novel and the repetitious, which allows listeners to remain interested and moving. In Rio, the music is kept alive at weekly bailes, or dances, which take place in the favelas and, occasionally, at ritzy downtown clubs. Da Matta estimates that there are as many as five hundred bailes a week, and the ten or so that he d.j.s provide him with his main source of income. Though funk CDs exist in Brazil, recordings are not a priority for the musicians. The point is to go to the bailes and dance like mad. As the hour inched past 2 a.m., Pentz took over, playing Missy's "Lose Control"a track as close to baile funk as anything you'll hear on the radio now. Then, slowing the pace, he switched to Missy's other new song, "On & On," a darkly funky thing. He played it for a minute or so before mixing in Cypress Hill's "Hand on the Pump," a menacing hip-hop track from 1991, which samples Gene Chandler's 1962 doo-wop song "Duke of Earl." This was the move of a skilled d.j.: "Hand on the Pump" is not obscure, but neither is it fashionable now, yet it sounded perfect emerging from "On & On." Pentz offered songs chosen neither to impress record collectors nor to please the peanut gallery, but which seemed connected in a deep, familial way. He played a foggy new song by Paul Wall called "Sittin' Sidewayz," a dazzling production by a newcomer from Austin named Salih Williamsthe kind of person Pentz will know about before you dowhich is built around a backward loop of Mexican guitar music. Finally, Pentz cued up his own remix of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl." The song was already greatsharp-edged and minimalistbut Pentz had made it better, embellishing it with cantering, syncopated drums to create a swinging dance track. Under Stefani's vocals, you could also hear snippets of baile funkfrom "Feira de Acari," a festive track that happens to have been produced by da Matta. When I talked to the d.j.s after the show, it became clear that though they come from different generations and cultures, both approach d.j.ing not as businessmen, or as celebrity seekers, but as ambassadors. They spoke repeatedly of the pleasures of "hooking people up" and of playing their favorite music for audiences that had never heard it. Pentz mentioned that Dave Kelly, a notable Jamaican dance-hall producer, was working on yet another remix of "Bucky Done Gun," which has now been remixed by da Matta himself, a turn of events that nicely illustrates the intricate connecting, borrowing, and trading that are the essence of popular music. Pentz and da Matta live for this process, the moments when they convert yet another dance floor, another listener, and each other ------------------------ Yahoo! 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