You’ve said before that you’re an easy target for criticism, as a white guy working with a lot of people of color.

I don’t really know what music I’m supposed to do. The first person I produced music for was M.I.A., and her music was basically a hodgepodge of everything, culturally. It was dancehall, it was R&B, it was punk—I just thought it was our music. I never thought for a minute, like, “What did it mean?” And that experience was my training ground for when I worked with rappers, or with Baltimore club music, or with the baile funk stuff. I’ve produced records for 2 Chainz. I did stuff for Skrillex’s project. I worked in Jamaica with Popcaan and Kranium. When I go to Jamaica and do shows, 10,000 Jamaicans will go and say, “Yeah, we’re fans of Major Lazer.” I’ve done Korean pop records. To this day, I don’t know what white music is. I influence people and they influence me. It’s always a conversation back and forth with people.

Where did you get these ideas about production, the back-and-forth?

At the end of the day, I’m a DJ. It sounds silly, but people like Afrika Bambaataa are my heroes because nobody was doing what he did before he did it. No one told him you can’t play Led Zeppelin. This was a guy who was mixing German records, rock records, electro records, and making his own records out of all that didn’t exist beforehand. I loved DJ Premier, DJ Shadow. I loved groups like The Pharcyde, Wu-Tang Clan. Stuff from my middle school days really inspired me, like hearing Brand Nubian sample a slowed-down guitar. I was like, “Wow, there’s no rules to hip-hop at this point.” I was raised on dancehall too. I loved this guy named Lenky, who produced the Diwali riddim for Sean Paul. He was sampling little bits and pieces of culture, like Indian music or Western soundtracks, or soft rock guitars. I just loved the idea of anything goes. Who fucking cares? All this shit could get thrown into a pot and make something amazing.

It seems like your process is partly about finding something you can sell. Is that how you approached working with Justin Bieber? He wasn’t doing so hot before “Where Are Ü Now.”

For one thing, you’ve gotta understand that the music industry is different than the critic industry—the writers and the people that are talking about what is on trend or whatever. When you’re doing music, you’re always on trend or off trend, and it’s important to show people respect no matter what.

I met Bieber a few years ago, producing a record for him with Ariel Rechtshaid called “Thought of You.” I’ve known his manager, Scooter, for many years—he used to manage Kelis. They showed me respect back then and were really nice to me, so I always just kept them within arm’s length. They trusted me when I asked for a vocal. It was like a no-brainer. They had hit a place where nothing was working for them, and Justin had kinda hit rock bottom with things, like from the press, from jail, and from, like, taking his pants down at an awards show or something. I wasn’t even paying attention, but I know that he wasn’t very cool. And I was trying to really help Skrillex rebrand his own project, too. If nothing else, I thought working with Bieber would be the most noticeable thing we could do. It would be a great record, and it would make everyone really fucked up. It would make them really disappointed in themselves, and really confused, like, “How do I like this record?”

Even from day one, as I started to develop, I saw people’s perceptions of me as a producer, and they always want to put me in one box or another. Maybe that’s why I’m a target for things, because I don’t belong anywhere. If I make a record that makes people think that Justin Bieber is cool and makes them dance to it—which seems to be one of the most daunting tasks ever—then maybe people will rethink the way they think about music, you know? It’s not so dry and clear, what’s cool and what isn’t. Good music is going to be good music. He’s somebody you don’t want to like, but you like it.

