Last Saturday, some time between waking up kind of drunk still, eating cookies with the weed delivery dude and when my phone died, #relevant #radical #goddess Venus Iceberg X and her Ghe20 Goth1k crew went in real hard on Diplo. The camps are not strangers, Venus traveled with Diplo last summer as Maluca's DJ on Mad Decent's Block Party tour. Last month, Diplo attended Ghe20 Goth1k's New York party and recorded a part of their set (crucial Ke$ha at 5 BPM moment, possibly) on his Blackberry. His treading in their hardstyle territory popped Venus' bad-girl mouth over this weekend, and the resulting back and forth on Twitter was haiku-epic, a sophomore-year-at Digital Life College discourse on race, appropriation, reggae, inspiration, Hot Topic, etc. The whole crossfire is below, exclusive statements on the beef from both Diplo and Venus follow after. Both of their comments came in with youtube links. New world, y'all!
Key for reading:
Venus and @Ghe20 Goth1k's tweets are in blue, Diplo's are in red. When he talked for more than 140 characters, Wes' tweets jumped to tmi.me— those are the ones that look different than the rest, in the grey-boxes. Other folks jumped in the conversation, too. @Jheri's tweet is pink, @DIAMOONDBLKHRT's contribution is blue.
From Diplo:
I've gotten hated for making music with MIA, with rappers, with Brazillians (sic), with Baltimore club producers. Let's not forget any dancehall (until we started to tour Jamaica). Now, it's really weird for me because hard style is traditionally angry/white/European music. So, after some careful research I tried to figure out if I am allowed to play or not play "hardstyle." Here is how I broke it down—I recently got a hardstyle mix with a Drake vocal...u can see it here. Now Drake is mixed race.. so it was even more complicated. Here is what one of the authorities on hard style had to say: "Biracial is a special case. If you're biracial you're allowed to play music that is "owned" by one of your ethnicities (sic) but only in a ratio to your racial makeup. So you can play an underground hip hop or vogue track but you gotta follow it w/ some broey dubstep. Sexual Preference same deal: gays = vogue allowed, str8s = no way . Bisexual, you can play one vogue track then you have to mix it with beatport tech house." Hardstyle is more complicated... according to the thunderdome 2010 promo video, in order to rep dutch hardcore or hardstyle you have to either burn a cross or suck a horse's dick.
Maybe don't click that link because I'm not even kidding about either of those (@ 0:18 secs in if you gotta know... no idea how this video is still on youtube!)
From Venus Iceberg X:
I DJ because I like to be live and I take pride in my concepts. I don’t bother to make music yet, because there's so much already there for me to play with and why make some garbage like Diplo? He looks for the next big trend, he creates 'derivative' music instead of putting on the raw shit, so its not surprising that a day after our interview on FADER comes out where we discuss the relevance of hardstyle to the youth, and a month after he attends GG, cell phone recording and all, he's now putting out a hardstyle set. It’s just plain weird. I went on the Mad Decent Block Party tour last year, he is by no means an experimental DJ, he's a crowd-pleaser of the cheapest kind. He desperately needs to stay relevant, but he has no story to tell and he doesn't care about authenticity or integrity.Whether a genre or a concept, people should realize that music, whether made or performed via production or DJing, is rooted in the experiences of the producer, his access, his perspective, history, limitations, or his privilege. The struggle, the ideas, the history of a person is all evident in the sounds they make and when the author is confused for someone else, the story gets misplaced and lost, not just in music, this happens in everything. It’s a vicious cycle that just keeps oppressing the same group of people and its disgusting.
Ghe20 G0th1k is about taking the original shit, pre-Diplo, and finding ways to wake people up and remind them you can have fun and be informed and not be a part of the problem all in one night. You can take a audience from Chicago to Iraq to Dominican Republic to Germany via Juke, Mawal, Perreo, hardstyle, and that is powerful because subconsciously you're connecting the dots and ringing the siren so people wake the fuck up. Clearly people who don't need change won't make change, they will dominate and expose their misogynistic, twisted guilt on twitter. And for the tweets that said 'white ppl can't steal white music' I just wanted to say that my favorite hardstyle band is black. Lol Rotterdam Terror Corps, check them out!
