BRAZILIAN WAX.(disc jockeys Wesley Pentz, Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta)(international influences on hip-hop music)(Interview)

On a hot night in June, an unadvertised show by two influential d.j.s was getting under way at Rothko, a small club on the Lower East Side. Wesley Pentz, who is twenty-six and goes by the name Diplo--"Just like 'Delta' or 'Chevrolet,' it's a word I made up," he says, though it may have something to do with the line drawing of a diplodocus dinosaur tattooed on the inside of his right forearm--was playing first. Pentz looks a little like Paul Newman and moves in the permanently relaxed manner of someone who is used to having people pay attention to him. He wore a yellow Lacoste tennis shirt with a T-shirt underneath and shuffled between several turntables and a laptop filled with mp3 files.

As he played, Pentz waved to people he recognized from parties he has thrown in New York and Philadelphia with his friend the d.j. Low Budget, under the collective name Hollertronix. Since 2002, when the two began collaborating, Hollertronix's aesthetic has become the template for modish d.j.s all over the Northeast: bumping, grinding commercial hip-hop blended with unlikely samples from well-known pop songs. Pentz is a particularly talented bricoleur, who knows how to match non-American beats (Radiohead, Elephant Man) with big-selling American voices (Lil' Flip, Trina) and produce a sound that is unexpectedly fresh. When Interscope Records commissioned a remix of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl," which was the No. 1 single in the country for four weeks this spring, the company hired Pentz.

At Rothko, Pentz's d.j. partner was not Low Budget but Fernando Luis Mattos da Matta, a forty-two-year-old Brazilian who goes by the name Marlboro and to whom Pentz has become close, thanks to the latest in a dizzying series of cross-cultural musical appropriations that began nearly thirty years ago. In 1977, the steely, intentionally robotic German electronic group Kraftwerk released "Trans-Europe Express," a song that became a hit in black clubs in New York. In 1981, Kraftwerk released a song with an unusually heavy and thumping drum-machine beat called "Numbers," which became an even bigger hit on black radio. The following year, a group from the Bronx called Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force released "Planet Rock," a track that combined the music from "Trans-Europe Express" and "Numbers" with acrobatic ensemble rapping. "Planet Rock" moves at a hundred and twenty-eight beats a minute--a little quicker than your basic disco song--and its urgent sound inspired a genre in New York and London called "electro," and a genre in Miami called "bass," which is distinguished by lyrics that are exclusively sexual and occasionally pornographic. (The best-known Miami bass group is 2 Live Crew, which in 1990 went to court in Broward County, Florida, to defend its right to use obscenities in its songs.)

When "Planet Rock" and Miami bass records reached Rio, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, they spawned yet another genre, "funk"--also referred to as "baile funk" or "funk carioca"--which, confusingly, does not resemble American funk music but, rather, sounds like Miami bass fused with Brazilian singing and drumming. Da Matta is the godfather of the Brazilian funk scene, and he was standing behind Pentz at Rothko as Pentz cued up a strange song called "Bucky Done Gun"--the reason that the two now play shows together.

Pentz produced "Bucky Done Gun" for the British artist M.I.A.--it appears on her current album, "Arular"--and it consists in large part of chopped-up bits of a song called "Injecao," by the Brazilian singer Deise Tigrona, which was recorded in da Matta's studio. Both tracks incorporate a tiny sample of the horns from Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now," the theme from "Rocky," to create a stabbing, jittery effect that is both thrilling and irritating. Deise Tigrona raps in the ungainly four-bar style of nineteen-eighties hip-hop, haranguing you as though you'd broken her ...