Major Lazer pulled the name out of a hat. Literally: Diplo and British producer Switch wrote words on scraps of paper in 2007, threw them in, and drew "major" and "lazer." The name was an accident. The music was a system. What Diplo and Switch built under that name — starting with a debut album recorded at Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, released on June 16, 2009 — was a specific method for importing the structural logic of dancehall into electronic music. That method is now so thoroughly baked into the festival-EDM sound that most people who love it have no idea where it came from.
The foundation was laid before Major Lazer existed. Diplo had spent years at Temple University in Philadelphia building Hollertronix sets that fused pop, hip-hop, '80s, and dancehall into one seamless mix. Then he and Switch were both pulled into M.I.A.'s orbit, each summoned by XL Recordings to make beats for her albums — Diplo called her "the catalyst for our music." The pair met at Fabric London, Switch noting that "we both had a soft spot for Jamaican music at the time." That shared obsession sent them to Kingston, where they embedded themselves in the local scene, working with Vybz Kartel, Turbulence, and Ms. Thing, and recording what became Guns Don't Kill People... Lazers Do with additional production from a young Afrojack. Diplo described the dancehall sound as "the end of the world, all the little influences — house, soca, oldies, R&B, jazz — it all ends up in Jamaica." Major Lazer was designed to make that convergence point audible to a global audience.
The track that proved the idea had velocity was "Pon de Floor," the debut album's second single, co-produced with Afrojack and featuring vocals from Vybz Kartel. The rhythm hit like a hydraulic piston — that stuttering, half-time percussive pattern that felt simultaneously ancient and from the future. It barely charted. But in 2011, Beyoncé sampled it for "Run the World (Girls)," and the drum pattern that had been circulating in club culture for two years suddenly had a global broadcast. Diplo told NME: "It took two years for somebody else to put it on the radio." Beyoncé's song was produced by Switch, and the sampling confirmed what Major Lazer had been arguing with their bodies at every show: dancehall's rhythmic architecture was strong enough to hold the weight of any genre you dropped on top of it.
The downstream effect was a genre. Dave Nada had already built moombahton in a Washington D.C. basement in the fall of 2009, slowing Dutch house music to reggaeton tempo. The "Pon de Floor" drums — specifically Afrojack's remix — became the rhythmic template for the whole movement, and Diplo's Mad Decent label released Dave Nada's moombahton compilation, spreading the sound through the exact network of blogs and DJs that had been watching Major Lazer since Kingston. The pipeline from Jamaican dancehall to festival-ready EDM ran directly through that infrastructure. When Diplo went back-to-back with Switch for their BBC Essential Mix, he shouted out the Jamaican artists who had shaped the Major Lazer sound — Barrington Levy, Alton Ellis, Burning Spear, Ken Boothe — a lineage that almost nobody in the crowd at a 2015 festival stage would have been able to name, but whose rhythmic vocabulary they were absorbing through every drop.
The full proof of concept arrived on March 2, 2015, when "Lean On" landed as the lead single from Major Lazer's third album, Peace Is the Mission. The production history of that track is a diagram of how Diplo worked. He had written it with MØ from an instrumental that collaborator Jr Blender had built in sessions in Trinidad. The hook was strong but the tempo was wrong. A year later, Diplo remixed the song at a completely different speed and sent it to French producer DJ Snake, who added a signature post-chorus. Then Diplo, MØ, and Blender reconvened in Las Vegas to rewrite the song at the new tempo. Rihanna had turned down an earlier reggae arrangement. Nicki Minaj had too. The version that MØ recorded became, in November 2015, Spotify's most streamed song of all time. Billboard ranked it the number one dance and electronic song of 2015 and noted that it gave "Major Lazer's reggae, trap and moombahton blend a pop gloss." MØ later described what had happened in the broader culture: "This new type of EDM sort of became the new Top 40 sound. It was this collage of different worlds mixed into a playful, cross-cultural, danceable new vibe."
The artists in your library who make that vibe now — the half-time drops, the pitched-up vocal chops sitting on top of a rhythm that breathes differently from four-on-the-floor house, the sense that the music is pulling from somewhere warmer and more physical than a European club — are working in a tradition that Major Lazer built by going to Kingston, getting the rhythm right at Tuff Gong Studios, and then spending six years proving it could travel. Diplo said it himself: "We had really invented something with the Major Lazer language." The festival-EDM moment did not invent that language. It inherited it.
