What Does DJ Khaled Actually Do?
To the untrained eye, DJ Khaled is an under-qualified hype man. In actuality, he's the secret ingredient behind some of the biggest rap songs of the past decade.
Khaled Mohamed Khaled aka DJ Khaled is a well-known pop-culture figure. Over the years, Khaled’s songs have dominated the charts. Khaled’s typical formula involves an avengers-like ensemble of A-list artists all packed onto one song.
After doing some snooping, fans can’t help but notice that Khaled only shouts tireless catchphrases and ad-libs over his songs. It can come across that Khaled leaves all the heavy lifting to his featured guests.
But what if we told you that DJ Khaled was actually a musical genius…
Khaled got his start working in record stores in New Orleans in 1993 where he crossed paths members of the Cash Money record label including a young Lil Wayne. From here, Khaled began DJing and fronting his own pirate radio station.
In 1998, Khaled moved to Miami and soon became involved with east coast rap collective Terror Squad including Fat Joe and the late Big Pun. Around this time, Khaled went under the names ‘Beat Novacane’ and ‘Arab Attack’ but the latter was soon changed following on from the September 11 terror attacks.
Throughout the early 2000s, he produced songs for the likes of; Fabolous, Pitbull, Ludacris and Fiend.
In 2006, Khaled released his first album called ‘Listennn... the Album’. The record had guest appearances from everyone from Kanye West to T-Pain.
One look at Khaled’s production credits and you can see, while he does make beats here and there for his projects, a majority of his work is manned by someone else.
So, what is Khaled doing? Khaled is an artist and repertoire (A&R) who is in charge of overseeing a project or scouting talent within the industry. In other words, an A&R might say person X would sound good on a song with person Y with person Z producing the track.
Most, if not all A&R’s in the music industry aren’t in the spotlight or the forefront of music. In other words, Khaled brings the track together. Also, Khaled is an executive producer who may finance, arrange or develop a particular song or album.
An example of this is his song ‘Wild Thoughts’. Khaled decided the sample of ‘Maria Maria’ by Carlos Santana would sound great with both Bryson Tiller and Rhianna singing over it.
The fruits of Khaled's labour have resulted in some of the biggest songs of the last decade.
Stream DJ Khaled on Spotify and Apple Music here.
