Jessica Iredale wrote about Diplo in yesterday's WWD. She describes him as an aspirational dude who's newly into fashion and glad to fly business instead of coach. Before breaking the news that Diplo has a girlfriend and a seven month old baby named Locket, Iredale lays out the current status of Diplo's relationship to M.I.A. Seven years after their jointly produced Piracy Funds Terrorism and three years post "Paper Planes," they aren't friends anymore, or in contact at all. "No one in my camp talks to her anymore. She’s kind of really gone crazy,” says Diplo. He says "Paper Planes" made her famous, but that before it's release 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."
He expresses frustration with M.I.A.'s very public, imperfect politics. “Maya left herself open for attacks. 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."
Diplo's opinion is familiar and not unpopular. M.I.A.'s latest full-length /\/\/\Y/\ was widely ridiculed, most notably by Lynne Hirschberg, who pieced together a vicious, circumspect profile for the New York Times after a 2010 interview, painting Maya as a scheming, beautiful faux-radical fool. Her latest release, the half-hour long ViCKi LEEKX mixtape, is an opaque mind-garden about the internet, security, truth, lies and trust. It has a lot of jams but not a mature ideology.
It's too bad that turns Diplo off. When Kim Taylor Bennett interviewed him for FADER #68's M.I.A. feature he seemed ultimately loyal to Maya. "No matter how much we fight, we make music really easy. There's still a chemistry that I'll probably have with her until I die." We still believe in that potential-for-magic, but it'll be no easy-business. In the same piece, Maya admitted she's reactionary. "I put in probably ten times more effort just to be difficult. I want a disgusting piece of work on the table because people should look at it and be like, "Why would you go there?" Diplo's in the money and done asking, for now.
