June 12, 2009: a Friday night at popular Kingston nightclub Quad. Minutes after 2 a.m., the evening’s special guests DJs/producers Wesley "Diplo" Pentz and David "Switch" Taylor will take over the club’s DJ booth and premiere their new collaborative project: Major Lazer.
In addition to the club’s usual Friday night clientele, in attendance are dancehall scene makers and music industry personalities who've come to hear Diplo and Switch’s unique selections and the premiere of the sonic-splicing tracks from their first album under the Major Lazer guise: Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do.
Recorded during a three-week period at the Marley family’s Tuff Gong studios in Kingston, Guns was released on June 16, 2009. The album juggles various sounds into a groundbreaking, genre-blurring collage of samples, audio effects and disparate influences with a significant dose of dancehall reggae’s syncopation, and a primarily Jamaican cast of vocalists.
On the album’s cover art by Ferry Gouw, (reminiscent of the vibrant Jamaican dancehall and dub album cover illustrations of the 1980s) Major Lazer is depicted as a brawny cartoon superhero, "a Jamaican commando who fights the spoils of vampires, zombies, pimps, mummies, and other unsavory forces of evil," according to the album’s press release. Aurally, however, Major Lazer’s ultimate mission was to expand the parameters of electronic dance music and present another avenue of exposure for dancehall reggae and other Caribbean rhythms.
"The intention was to translate how inspired we were by the scene in Jamaica because we drew from a lot of the sounds there," Switch tells GRAMMY.com via Zoom.
The innovative fusion of various electronic music pulses with the island’s reggae and dancehall riddims, as well as the incorporation of dub, took Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do to No. 7 on Billboard’s Top Electronic Albums and No. 5 on the U.S. Top Heatseekers charts. Diplo and Switch further popularized Major Lazer with frenetic performances at raves and dance music festivals around the world.
Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do turned 15 this year. In celebration, Diplo and Switch recently released a deluxe digital reissue of the album, which includes three additional tracks: "Pon De Streets," an alternate version of the original’s album’s hit single "Pon De Floor"; "Nobody Move," with new vocals by Vybz Kartel adapted to a beat created during the album’s initial recording session (found on a hard drive that was locked away in a vault for years); and "Where’s The Daddy," featuring M.I.A., who Diplo once called "the third Daddy of Major Lazer."
M.I.A. originally recorded her "Where’s The Daddy" vocals when she was pregnant (she gave birth to her son in February 2009); as an acknowledgement of that time, she cradles a baby bump throughout the song’s 2024 video.
Diplo, an American, and the British Switch were both immersed in house and other forms of electronic music prior to creating Major Lazer. They merged their cutting-edge, genre-defying approaches on their co-production of M.I.A's chart-topping "Paper Planes"; the song was nominated for Record Of The Year at the 51st GRAMMY Awards.
Diplo and Switch made several beats for M.I.A. that were never used, and decided to record them in Jamaica where, as Diplo noted on X, "the artists were extremely talented, the Jamaican music scene at the time was cutting edge and it was cheap to work there." Those surplus beats coupled with the pair’s ongoing fascination with Jamaica’s dancehall culture led to the creation of Major Lazer.
"It was incredible going to the parties there, whether on the streets or in the clubs, and seeing the interaction between the crowds, the selectors and the deejays," Switch explains. "We were cutting our teeth as DJs and producers and wanted to do something different; we thought, if we can introduce what was going on in Jamaica to a more American environment, that would be amazing, so that’s what we set out to do."
Despite their respective accomplishments as DJs/producers, Diplo and Switch were largely unknown to the Quad’s Friday night patrons at the time of Major Lazer’s debut. They worked hard to win the crowd over with a set that alternated between pounding techno beats, customized dancehall selections, an array of audio effects and a computerized voice that sporadically intoned "Major Lazer." Despite their best efforts, the clubgoers remained indifferent until an appearance by a comical African character calling himself Prince Zimboo (featured on the album’s track "Baby," which incorporates an auto-tuned cry of an infant that’s sampled on elsewhere on the record) thawed the audience’s initially icy response.
Via email, Diplo recalls Major Lazer’s Jamaica debut with brutal candor: "We sucked…basically got booed but Prince Zimboo told a bunch of good jokes and people were happy to have some funny-ass crackers in the club."
Switch, who reflects on that night with greater fondness, remembers feeling "confident that we could play music that no one else had, but could we step into that scene that had inspired us?"
While Switch recalls being nervous about not having a vocalist toasting live on the riddims or hyping up the crowd, he revealed, "more preparation went into that set than either of us has pulled off together or individually. Diplo and I made our own dubs. We took acapella dancehall vocals and put them on our beats, put new vocals on already established dancehall beats and juggled a lot of sounds."
Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazers Do, released four days after their Quad gig, kicks off with "Hold The Line," a crackling spaghetti Western meets surf rock soundscape. An immediate indication of Major Lazer’s preparation and myriad influences, the tune is punctuated by the mantra-like, hi-pitched vocals of barrier-breaking singer Santigold, sharp patois verses from Jamaica’s Mr. Lexx, neighing horses and ringing phones, an eclectic combination designed to make the listener "vibrate like a Nokia."
What follows is the intergalactic throb of "When You Hear the Bassline" (featuring Jamaica’s Miss Thing), the near-psychedelic, cavernous dub resonance of "Lazer Theme" (Jamaica’s Future Trouble), and appealing pop-soca flavored dancehall on "Keep It Goin’ Louder." Artists from the diaspora abound: Queens’ Nina Sky and Brooklyn-based Jamaican Ricky Blaze appear on "Keep It, Goin’ Louder" while Guyana born, Brooklyn raised singer Jahdan Blakkamoore’s exquisite vocals swirl amidst the delay and reverb on the dub-drenched Rasta empowerment anthem "Cash Flow."
"We just wanted to add to the lexicon of dancehall," Diplo writes of the album. "We never tried to elevate or move the sound forward…we just wanted to make something weird."
Out of the weirdness came a significant hit — and the album’s most-streamed track — "Pon De Floor." Created with additional production by Dutch DJ Afrojack, "Pon De Floor" is dominated by a sputtering synth over a marching band snare drum pattern; dancehall’s "Worl’ Boss," Kartel rhymes "baby, get in line, let me see your bestest wine."
"Jamaican DJ crew Chromatic made 'Pon De Floor' a hit in Kingston and it grew from there to the rest of the world," Diplo notes. The track reached the UK Singles Chart, was featured on the "DJ Hero 2" video game, and then attained widespread attention when sampled on Beyoncé’s 2011 hit "Run the World (Girls)."
The song’s stylized video, (think "Pee-wee’s Playhouse" meets Kingston’s now defunct Passa Passa street dance) was directed by comedian Eric Wareheim. The video stars Skerritt Bwoy, Major Lazer’s former hype man, who introduced many viewers to the hypersexualized dancehall "dance" ritual known as daggering.
"'Pon De Floor' was unlike anything that was going on in Jamaica at the time, but it was inspired by the energy of the clubs there," Switch remarks. "I remember going to Hellshire Beach and the DJ at an event there pulled the record up three or four times. Watching the crowd’s reaction, it was like we were vindicated, the song penetrated the real Jamaica scene, people are ok with us; that was a real thrill."
Yet, some weren’t ok with Major Lazer, two white foreigners spearheading a Black Jamaica-rooted album. Protests of cultural appropriation were cited in some reviews, without considering the credentials of the Caribbean artists involved and the benefits many of them derived from it.
"Major Lazer did wonders for me," Vybz Kartel tells GRAMMY.com. "They helped to push me to an audience that normally wouldn’t know Vybz Kartel; with 'Pon de Floor' they could put a name and a face to the song, which definitely gave me a lot of new fans, so big up Major Lazer, every time."
"It was incorrect to think we were doing anything like cultural appropriation, it was journalistic," adds Switch. "We found something that we thought would be appealing and wanted to champion it, expose it. We ended up with Vybz Kartel being on a Beyoncé record, the two farthest apart worlds colliding, and we’re very grateful that we got to bridge that gap."
As Major Lazer’s popularity escalated, Switch decided to leave in 2011, preferring to remain behind the scenes, producing and developing his songwriting skills. "At that time [Diplo] was very focused on the opposite, he was taking the DJ world by storm and it felt like he was fine doing it on his own, collaborating with the people he went on to collaborate with," acknowledges Switch. "But we never really stopped working on stuff together."
In a recent video, Diplo said he considers Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazer’s Do to be "a little bit of punk, a little bit of dancehall, a little bit of pop songwriting" made "really, really fun." "We had nothing to prove, we just decided to put out something that was crazy. I think the album really hit with people because they loved the roughness of it. It had no rules and I think it was very important to break the stereotypes."
Guns Don’t Kill People…Lazer’s Do reminds music fans that dub — created through the innovations of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry — established the template for remixes by demonstrating the infinite possibilities for deconstructing a recorded work. It also served as a reminder that dancehall reggae, which utilized digitized instrumentation beginning in the mid-1980s, are not only forms of dance music, but have played significant roles in its evolution. Switch adds that the album brought greater attention to dancehall/reggae at a time when international interest in the music had waned.
"I think the album really opened the door for dancehall, not just in dance music but pop music as well. If you listen to what Benny Blanco does with Ed Sheeran, that’s about as mainstream as it gets."
There’s a subtle Jamaican deejay cadence in Sheeran’s vocals on "Don’t" and a lilting, off-beat reggae guitar strum on "Take It Back," produced, respectively, by Blanco and Rick Rubin, for Sheeran’s 2014 album x (Multiply). Sheeran’s 2017 album ÷ (Divide) includes the dancehall inflected hit "Shape of You," which topped Billboard’s 2017 year-end singles chart).
"I’m not saying that wouldn’t have happened without Major Lazer," Switch continues, "but I feel like we oiled the cogs and pointed out a different kind of rhythm that had greater commercial prospects in the pop world, coming from the dancehall scene in Kingston."