REWIND: MAJOR LAZER WANTS TO RECRUIT YOU FOR HIS RENEGADE ZOMBIE-KILLING ARMY

Every Friday, we hit rewind to visit one of our older playlists. The following is one of our favorites from the Loudcrowd vaults.

Esteemed producer/ musicians Diplo and Switch seem kind of to have gone insane. And we mean that in the most fun/ loving way! See, they’ve created an album that’s supposedly been made by Major Lazer, a Jamaican commando fighter dude who lost his arms “in the secret zombie war of 1984,” and had them replaced by lazers. Dude also has a a rocket-powered skateboard and he fights the spoils of vampires, zombies, pimps, mummies, and other unsavory forces of evil. Maybe they didn’t go crazy so much as they just turned into 13 year old teenage boys, somehow — maybe via a magic potion?

So, if this project isn’t at least as big as Gorillaz, we’ll be very confused. From the smart selection of guest vocalists drawn from the urban/ dancehall scenes — M.I.A., Ward 21, Santigold, Elephant Man and Busy Signal — to the crazy quilt of sounds backing the whle thing up — it’s pretty rad. As our friends at Pitchfork wrote of the song “Hold The Line,” “the colorful samples are used in service of production that combines the smarts of sleek minimalism with future-dub cyber-dancehall weirdness.” Yeah! And Diplo himself said in a press release that the album sounds like “digital reggae and dancehall from Mars in the future!”

In honor of the Major Lazer debut album Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do hitting the streets this month, we’ve assembled a playlist that’s both booty-shaking and military-themed which is kind of weird but we think it turned out alright! Also, we asked Wesley Pentz AKA Diplo for a list of his all-time favorite tracks —from the point of view of Major Lazer, naturally— and he responded with an unsurprisingly diverse mix of blues, reggae and club tracks both old and new:

MAJOR LAZER’S TOP TEN OF FOREVER
1. Ackie, “Call me Rambo”
2. Buccaneer, “Bad Man Story (Baddis)”
3. Jaylib, “Champion Sound”
4. Zebra, “Unfair U Know”
5. Club Nouveau, “Why You Treat Me So Bad”
6. Santigold, “Creator”
7. Sepultura, “Roots Bloody Roots”
8. Elephant Man, “Gully Creepa”
9. Beenie Man, “Bad Man Business”
10. Buddy Guy, “Hard Time Killing Floor”