At the height of Occupy Wall Street, a DJ called Samim tweeted, “Did you know that the richest 1% of DJ´s control over 80% of the industry´s wealth and over 70% the media coverage? #occupyDJs.” Perhaps it was meant as an off-hand joke, but the fact that the DJ industry is an unbalanced place in terms of representation and equity is clearly a reality. Nothing materialized this notion more than DJ Mag’s annual Top 100 DJs list, which read like a Forbes’ top 100, but for the world’s wealthiest DJs. Many people noticed the racial, gender, and wealth imbalances of the list, which in today’s music world almost seems preposterous (or maybe not). Especially considering that house and techno music’s roots are in the black and/or queer communities of the Rust Belt urban centers of the American Midwest, it becomes a curious example of cultural appropriation.

Noticeably absent from the list was popular American DJ, Diplo, also a successful producer, record label owner, and style icon. Perhaps the reason why he didn’t show up in the list is because he explicitly prefers to align himself with a global contemporary “underground.” Most recently he has done so in a series of travel journals for Vanity Fair magazine. The first one about this past year’s Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago and the latest where he “Discovers the Last True Underground Club Scene in New York.”  In these travel journals Diplo makes clear his critical stance to the mainstream. But, with all the structural inequalities inherent in the industry, and qualifying statements like, “I don’t know a lot about being black and gay and cool,” Diplo’s critique mostly ends up sounding a lot like someone looking for redemption in a pure, untouched, uncontaminated, Other.

No matter where you are in the world, if there’s an underground dance scene or marginalized community nearby, Diplo, or someone like him, has or probably will “discover,” re-frame, and sell it to audiences in another part of the world. Critiques of these practices are not hard to come by. In a recent interview in GQ magazine, Diplo defended his practices, arguing that people in various global music scenes, like dancehall in Jamaica, just want their music to reach larger audiences and that he facilitates their success. At the same time, his position as cultural authority has earned him gigs producing for acts like Beyoncé and No Doubt.

I’m not a scholar of Marx, but if I applied some of his basic principles on how capitalism works, it’s not too hard to fit someone like Diplo into the role of Value appropriator and distributor (he admits as much in the GQ interview.)  Instead of coming from labor, Value in this instance is “street credibility” that is harvested from these underground sub-cultures. This credibility is what allows Diplo to have a career as an internationally touring DJ, and Hollywood tastemaker. But in order for Diplo to keep his position as mediator, he must reinforce the underground (Other) status of the scene he is revealing. This is especially evident when one realizes that scenes such as dancehall, carnival, and vogue aren’t really that “undiscovered” after all. Yet, exploitation in this manner is essential to the way capitalism functions, so maybe it’s not fair to blame one individual for his role in the greater system.

While I fit into both of the groups that Diplo seems to despise (academia and journalism), I am also a global urban dance scene practitioner. Perhaps it would be useful for me to turn to an example of more progressive trends I see, to illustrate the potential of DJing as a revolutionary cultural artform.

This past March, a Twitter “beef” broke out between Diplo and New York based DJ, Venus X. The basic crux of their back-and-forth centered on the attempt of Diplo to record one of Venus’ sets. After he recorded her set, noticing that he performed a set similar to hers, and keenly aware of Diplo’s reputation for “genre discovery”, she decided to call him out for it. He claimed he was helping her get famous. She insisted that she didn’t want to be discovered.