Two years later, Diplo is no longer an outsider. He and M.I.A. are on some new-millennium power-couple shit, he's turned baile funk into a hipster cause celebre, and he's worked with guys like Vybz Kartel and Kano. More importantly, you can go out any night of the week in New York and hear DJs mix Southern gutter-rap into new-romantic synthpop. Diplo often gets dissed as a carpet-bagging dilettante, but he's ultimately made clubland safe for carpet-bagging dilettantes like, um, me. So it's appropriate that the London club Fabric would invite Diplo to contribute to its Fabriclive mix series. What compelled Diplo to turn in his most obvious, placid mix yet is another matter. FabricLive 24 features plenty of amazing music and finds some inspired connections, but the great thing about Diplo has always been his ecstatic embrace of chaos, and we don't get a whole lot of that here.
The first third of the mix is dominated by a long, unbroken set of 80s electropop tracks (Cybotron, Yazoo, Debbie Deb) which, while uniformly great, are so thematically close to each other that they grow monotonous. When he segues into harder, raunchier stuff (Cajmere's acid-house classic "Percolator", Ludacris' bounce-twerk classic "What's Your Fantasy?"), he does it by way of watery click-house tracks like Solid Groove's "This Is Sick". Later, a baile funk mini-set builds up intensity nicely for the snarl-grime energy-bomb of Jammer's "Destruction VIP", only to deaden its own momentum with the Cure's undanceable "Lovesong". And it would've been a great idea to end a dance mix with a mopey, meditative Cat Power jam if Tim Sweeney hadn't already done the exact same thing a year ago.
At its worst, Fabriclive 24 is a haphazard and repetitive mix of a bunch of great tracks-- which is still not a bad thing. But it also gives us one tantalizing glimpse of what it could be when Diplo mixes Outkast's "B.O.B." into Le Tigre's "Deceptacon": two frantic, desperate, furious dancefloor anthems right on top of each other, both songs feeding on each other and finding a sense of ecstatic liberation. My jaw dropped when he pulled off the same transition at Intonation, and it nearly did again here. If this one moment of beautiful insanity overshadows the rest of Diplo's fun, competent mix CD, maybe that should tell him he needs to be doing fewer fun, competent mix CDs and making more moments like that happen.
