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1. Top Ranking University
2. Santogold Diplo Top Ranking Rar File

If you know anything about Diplo, you would know that he’s pretty much crazy. His eclectic mixtape-making style is chaos at its best and madness anyways every other time. Diplo’s new project with Santogold, The Top Ranking Mixtape, is just that, the top ranking mixtape on the net right now, and I know I’m a little late to the party (I’ve had it for nearly two weeks now, and knew about it before that), but it’s about time I said some words about it. Better late than never, eh?

>>Read the rest of the review and download the mixtape

Let’s start with the people behind the music before we take on this immodestly challenging album. Diplo and Santogold. Does this formula sound familiar? It should because only a few years ago (2005?) the brilliant producer from Philly teamed up with genre-defying world-music popstar M.I.A. to make the Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1 mixtape that shocked the hip-hop listening world. M.I.A. was the hottest chick making music back then in a purely underground environment, and Diplo had already established his position in the production world with his baile-funk dub-step mixtape, Favela on Blast (which incidentally, is one album with more baile-anything and Miami bass than one white boy from the states should even know about). It was a total hit. Previewing the greater part of M.I.A.’s up-and-coming Arular and releasing to the masses their first glimpse of the hit single “Galang,” anybody that considered themselves in-the-know had it, or had a problem.

• The Diplo/Santogold mixtape Top Ranking is news nearly everywhere in blogland these days–it’s a sequel of sorts to all the fun we had with Piracy Funds Terrorism, after all!
• Santogold v Diplo - Top Ranking. All the disparate influences from Santogold's genre-smashing album came alive with help from MIA's one-time collaborator Diplo. Cut Copy - So Cosmic.

Top Ranking: A Diplo Dub Santogold & Diplo Genre House remix Comment by user17916108. I moved from Google Play to Spotify a couple months ago and just realized today that this didn't transfer over. I was seriously panicking, so THANK YOU! 2021-02-19T00:58:50Z Comment by Jacob Alaniz 3.

Fast forward 3 years and Diplo has teamed up with a new pseudo-pop diva whose goals are to “be a creator/ thrill is to make it up.” That’s right: Santogold. A Brooklyn-native whose fashion style and equal affinity to defy genre lines has been compared to M.I.A. by any and every half-witted music critic with a laptop and some free time. With Santogold’s debut album of the same name, released earlier this year, topping charts and getting lots of play time in clubs from east coast to west coast, she’s been getting a lot of love lately, and the internet DJs are tearin’ it up. Everybody and their sound engineer wants to take apart and remix “Creator,” the mainstream dub-step pop hit that got mad MTV love earlier this summer, or perhaps “L.E.S. Artistes,” the surprisingly hip girl-rock track that heads off the album. The list goes on, with “Starstruck,” the trance-inducing back-beat hit, or maybe “Anne,” “I’m a Lady,” “Lights Out”, “Shove It,”…the list goes on. Almost every track on Santogold is gold, and have been Dj remix-fodder since the day it hit the blogs.

Okay, so why would Diplo want to do something that everybody else has done? Well, that’s the question everyone was asking when their google search of “Santogold remix” turned up a jaw dropping thirty-five track mixtape. That is, that was the question until we listened to it. We should have known not to doubt you, Diplo, and we’re sorry we every did.

Top Ranking University

If you weren’t paying attention to your iPod when you played it, you wouldn’t even think you were listening to an album, especially if this was your first experience with Diplo dubs. The man skips from one genre to another with ease and frequently a defiance that makes you laugh to yourself, “did he really just do that?” I’m not kidding, if it weren’t for the typical hard-as-hell rappers over most of the beats I wouldn’t know that this was a mixtape that someone crafted, which is what it is. Following an unintelligible path, and using more samples than any one person should have, at some times it sounds more like a hipster Girl Talk album than anything else, but masterfully Diplo just…makes it work.

For example, “Shuv it (Disco D Blend)” uses an Enrico Morricone sample over the Santogold lyrics, and that transitions into Diplo’s own remix of “I’m a Lady” featuring female rapper Amanda Blank, which could get a lot of play in clubs. That goes into “Posse on Broadway,” using the same beat as the previous track, which then goes into Diplo’s remix of “Lights Out,” which is graced by Diplo’s heavy use of mindless and often unintelligible reggae-babble. That goes into a seemingly untouched sample from Aretha Franklin’s “Save Me” more likely heard on the radio in the late 1960s than in anything called a club-dub, which transitions into Devo’s “Be Stiff,” moving onto the eighties pop song by the B-52s, “Mesopotamia,” and you’re only a third of the way through the mixtape. I need a breath. Some of the best tracks on the tape aren’t even Diplo tracks either. The XxxChange remix of “L.E.S. Artistes,” which has made its rounds through the blogs is on there, and that’s a banger. So is the Mumdance mix of “Creator.” Other really cool tracks are Santogold’s own unreleased material including the Clash-inspired cover of Guns of Brixton, “Guns of Brooklyn.” Santogold’s ethereal-vocalled out “Anne” is on there, too, remixed by Diplo’s buddy and tour-mate Switch.

But if this is just a cluster-fuck of samples from the past 40 years, why does Diplo get the “mastermind” label that so many music critics (including myself) bestow upon him? Could it be just the sheer volume of material that he is working with? Yeah, maybe he gets brownie points for being that guy who digs up the 90s dancehall hit from Jamaica and slaps some Shawty Lo over it. His timing adds to the praise I’m willing to throw at this mixtape. In the middle of this renaissance-of-a-summer, this tape is reassuring us that good music can still be making a comeback. If Diplo is at the helm, it might mean a lot of Brazilian/Jamaican shit you’ve never heard of, but for now, that’s okay. Good luck looking up the lyrics.

Top Ranking: A Diplo Dub

Grade: A-

You can download the mixtape HERE

Santogold Diplo Top Ranking Rar File

–Frosty Fresh