I’ve been a follower of Diplo’s remixes (given that I know and love the song) ever since I listened to his remix of Britney’s Circus about 2 years ago. I remember listening to that track so many times I think I preferred it over the original. Since then I’ve been on the lookout for his remixes, especially when he did Flashing Lights in Kanye’s Sky High remix album, and of course, the DFX remix of M.I.A’s Paper Planes in the Slumdog soundtrack, which added so much flavor to the already awesome song.

Fast forward about a year or two, I started getting into k-pop (much to my own surprise) and have been an avid enthusiast for one year now. GD & TOP, 2 of heavyweight group Big Bang‘s rappers released a collab rap album late last year and gave it a new flavor to the apparently vapid manufactured k-pop sound by describing their music as “ghetto electro” which, you guessed it, rhymes done in electro music. I loved almost all of the songs from the album, despite my poor understanding of the language and one particular track was one of my many favorites called KNOCK OUT (???? / Ppeokigayo).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL0sfti1DcA&feature=player_embedded

GD&TOP released a music video for it and it’s probably one of my favorite k-pop videos of all time, if you actually consider it k-pop? One point in the video TOP shows the name DIPLO in big bold letters and I was wondering, what could be the relation to the song? Are they fans of the great DJ? Did he have something to do with the song? A couple of weeks later, Diplo tweets that he wants to move to Korea. He found out that the music video gained almost a million views overnight (thus lead to his knowledge about how “influential” k-pop is) and people had mad praise for the song. He then wrote a blog post confirming that not only did he have something to do with the song, he actually produced the beats. I have mad praise for this guy despite being slightly cocky and annoying (on twitter), heh.

[youtube width=”560″ height=”344″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkukueGI_fk[/youtube]

I felt like writing about this because Dumbfounded, a really talented Korean-American rapper covered this song and put his own spin to it, luckily with American rhymes this time. I loved his take so much I ripped the song from YouTube and put it in my iPod. All thanks to the awesome great sexy Diplo for providing such a sick beat.

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