Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do

Dancehall is a musical idiom with its roots in Jamaica—a fact that you’d almost be forgiven for forgetting in 2009, after several years of British and American producers and DJs planting their own colonial flags on the genre’s turf, and importing much of it back to their own homelands. A simple form at heart, dancehall offers enough flexibility and room for creative interpretation and ornamentation that it’s become a favored style in US and UK dance music; according to MetaCritic, the top-rated album of 2008 was The Bug’s London Zoo, a distinctly British album by a distinctly British producer (albeit with some Jamaican vocalists in tow), which commandeered dancehall as a vessel for political outcry that was both universal and—yes—distinctly British.

Which is all simply to say that it shouldn’t be too surprising to find that 2009’s flagship dancehall release—at least stateside—is a collaborative affair between one Yank and one Brit. (Never mind that they’re both white.) Diplo and Switch christened themselves Major Lazer for their explosive and expansive debut, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, a record that actually stands as a fairly complete primer on dancehall’s tropes and its dizzyingly creative spirit—again, no big surprise. That’s not to say that it’s the best dancehall album in recent memory — London Zoo is a more focused and affecting work by a mile—but it is a buoyantly diverse record that nicely highlights the music’s pliability, and also its risks of indulgence.

Switch and Diplo, by the way, produced M.I.A.’s hit “Paper Planes,” and they dive into this music with a similar rush of creativity and imagination; Lazers is a big, blustery mess of an album that’s brimming with ideas, sounding as though it’s designed to cover nearly every corner of the dancehall scene. Like Gorillaz before them, they created an elaborate, comic-book backstory for this project, which gives you some idea of the playful spirit at work here, a spirit that spills over into the first song, “Hold the Line,” which begins as a spaghetti Western before building into surf guitar and thumping, club-ready beats.

From there, pretty much anything goes: This is an opulent recording on which hooks come in the form of ringing cellphones and Auto-tuned babies, and the subject matter ranges from politics to sex to weed. It’s a sometimes silly but frequently exhilarating, overblown monster of a record where dancehall traditions are caressed by American hop-hop and dance sensibilities (including T-Pain-ish Auto-Tune effects and vocals from Santigold!), and where imagination reigns supreme. Most of the songs are killer; a few fall flat. The dividing line between the two comes when the imagination sags and Diplo and Switch lean too closely on tired clichés.

Indeed, this music is obviously made by two guys who not only love dancehall, but know a lot about it: They pick up on many of the genre’s running threads, and often take them into fun new places. “Anything Goes,” for instance, continues the genre’s long history of political outspokenness, and it’s a riveting and menacing riot of sound and fury. Elsewhere, “Mary Jane” is a predictable take on the time-honored drug anthem, but the song’s energy and its goofy, cinematic production flourishes turn it into something fun and memorable, if somewhat silly and slight. “What You Like” is minimalist funk that tries to be sexy, but instead it’s just boring and callously vulgar.

The rest? Pretty much all great, with a few flat-out incredible songs, and, with the exception of just one track, it’s never, never dull. On the contrary, this is music that shows just how much fun traditional idioms can be when they’re approached with enthusiasm and creativity—an album that’s lavishly imaginative and endlessly enjoyable—in other words, just what you’d expect from two ace producers taking to such fertile musical terrain. No surprises there.

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Tagged as: dancehall, UK

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