Look no further for an example of the irreverent attitude of US dance figurehead than the fact he declined at the last moment to be interviewed for the Top 100. No big surprise, as he’s shown time and time again that he doesn’t give a shit; which also makes him one of the most outspoken, amusing, and more often than not, insightful voices in dance music.

Witness his response to the controversy around deaths at NYC’s Electric Zoo this year.

"We're such a conservative culture that we'd rather not talk about the things kids want to do, even though they're going to do them anyway… persecuting a festival is not going to help because kids are going to do them regardless,” he told Rolling Stone, saying what few others dare to.

Music wise, it’s been a year of goal kicking for one of America’s most successful and consistently innovative DJ/producers. The first half of the year saw the release of the long-awaited new 'Free the Universe' album from his Jamaican-flavoured Major Lazer collective, this time minus Switch on production duties. Diplo’s independent Mad Decent outfit also had a cracker of a 2013, when Baauer's 'Harlem Shake' busted through to take the No.1 spot on the Billboard charts, and to date racking up more than 20 million views on YouTube, making the song one of the year’s biggest crossover smashes and establishing the label as one of the success stories of the internet era.

Consider its Mad Decent Mondays residency in Las Vegas as a sign of the sway it holds in the US. Of course, Diplo is also appropriately irreverent when it comes to the American establishment’s mass embrace of dance culture over the past few years. “They just want to jump on EDM dick,” he said of the major labels to the Huffington Post this year.