At the 1995 Source Awards, Suge Knight, the thug mogul of Death Row Records, took to the stage to criticize his rival, Sean (Puffy) Combs, the founder of Bad Boy Records. “Any artist out there that want to be an artist and want to stay a star, and don’t want to have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, all on the record, dancing—come to Death Row,” he howled. He was drawing a line between being “real” and being “commercial,” and between the backstage impresario and the on-air talent. Combs, he implied, disrupted the balance, and took the spotlight off actual entertainers; he was standing where he shouldn’t be, in a place reserved for creators.
The desire to be “all on the record, dancing” is DJ Khaled’s entire ethos. He studied Combs carefully and sought to make being “commercial” a personality. He is not a performer; he is a presenter. His superpower is networking—as a d.j. in Miami, he amassed considerable connections. His creative philosophy is exemplified by a quote that he gave to The Fader, in 2013: “If you can’t find it, you gotta go make it. If you can’t make it, you gotta go find it.” He leans heavily toward the latter. He can’t rap and, until recently, he rarely produced, so “finding it” was often pegged as his sole talent. His lack of involvement in the creative process became a running gag. “What Does DJ Khaled Do and Is He Good for Hip-Hop?” a Complex story from 2012 asked. “Solving the Mystery of What DJ Khaled Actually Does,” posited another, from 2016, in the Houston Press. Khaled aspired to fill a position that Combs once gave himself: “vibe giver.”
Khaled’s megamix cuts, filled with boldface artists, once had a certain novelty. When he started, he was assembling rappers in his orbit for low-stakes rap-offs. The music had a clear precursor: the promotional mixtapes used by rap d.j.s to cement their statuses as masters of the airwaves. The albums followed a formula marked out by DJ Clue’s “The Professional” and Kid Capri’s “Soundtrack to the Streets.” But Khaled had far larger aspirations: he wanted to be seen as a hitmaker in his own right. By his second album, he’d cracked the code. “We Takin’ Over,” with Akon, T.I., Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Birdman, and Lil Wayne, scored him his first platinum record. “I’m So Hood,” with T-Pain, Trick Daddy, Rick Ross, and Plies, scored him his first outright hit—and the official remix of the song, which added more than twice as many new verses, became a mark of his growing reach.
In recent years, Khaled has used his influence to transform himself into a sort of rap Tony Robbins. He preaches a positivity gospel so empty that it borders on satire, or even performance art. He has even become a cartoon character, using an animated self-help persona to sell the everyman on the keys to success. In 2016, he wrote a book of affirmations literally called “The Keys.” The following year, he released an album called “Grateful.” He sold thrones and gold lions as part of a furniture line. He promoted a cryptocurrency (and was subsequently charged by the S.E.C. for failing to disclose payments that he received for the promotion). He played a motivational coach in a Geico ad. Everything he did came to feel like marketing, most of all his music.
DJ Khaled albums now seem to exist solely for the pursuit of clout. The songs are high-profile mashups devised as heat-seeking missiles for the Billboard charts. The choices of artists are tailored to burnish his personal brand, the music equivalent of bathing in the residual glow of a string of celebrity name drops—accomplishment by association. The music isn’t a success if it’s good; it’s a success if it reinforces Khaled’s self-perpetuating myth of the A-list hitmaker.
That myth threatened to unravel, in 2019, when Khaled and his album “Father of Asahd” lost a chart race to Tyler, the Creator’s “IGOR.” In a shameless (but not uncommon) attempt to boost sales by using bundled purchases, Khaled sold the album with energy drinks through an e-commerce site, Shop.com. According to the Times, Billboard disqualified most of Khaled’s bundles for encouraging unauthorized bulk sales and awarded the No. 1 slot to Tyler. After working transparently in pursuit of the top spot, the proponent of the “All I Do Is Win” ideology finished second.
By that point, Khaled’s all-star collaborations were losing juice. In 2017, the Scottish d.j. and producer Calvin Harris released an album called “Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1,” which he produced himself. The songs were sleeker and more organized, and they had far more interesting groupings. The singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, with his “No.6 Collaborations Project,” turned the format into a truly creative exercise. As time has gone on, the type of collaborations that it seemed only Khaled could orchestrate have started to come about naturally. Last month, the rappers Young Thug and Gunna released “Slime Language 2,” a label compilation full of unusual pairings.
Khaled has been forced to adapt, and his new album, “Khaled Khaled,” tweaks the model. The use of his full name is supposed to signify maturation. “If you look at some of your favourite icons, there’s a point when people start calling them by their real name,” he told the U.K edition of GQ. “You know Khaled as a mogul, as a hustler, but I am a father. And a winner. And I am God’s child.” In keeping with that symbolic evolution, he plays the auteur this time. After a Michael Bay-like run of big set pieces with explosive combinations, Khaled wants to become the Steven Spielberg of the rap blockbuster.
A few of the biggest artists of the moment—Drake, Cardi B, and Justin Timberlake, who have at least fourteen No. 1 songs between them—get solo showcases. (Drake gets two.) One of rap’s most promising risers, Lil Baby; the cult phenomenon Bryson Tiller; and the egot contender H.E.R. all appear multiple times. Khaled shuffles the matchups around a bit. Beneath these cosmetic adjustments, though, it all feels familiar. Most of the performers on this album were on his previous one, and the music yearns to reach new heights without taking any risks. The shortcomings of “Khaled Khaled” are twofold: it is a failure of imagination and a failure of spectacle. Even when previous Khaled singles started to feel as if they were product tested before a group of Spotify data analysts, there was at least a curatorial sensibility at work. Now Khaled is producing full-on paeans to prosperity, and the music makes no attempt to entertain.
When Khaled brought the bona-fide pop star Justin Bieber into the fold, on “I’m the One,” from 2017, it felt like a huge get. But the move only seems like pandering by now, the third time around. There is no thrill in the return of the Migos or the oddball union of Post Malone and Megan Thee Stallion. And there is no refuge to be found in the beats, which rely heavily on classic rap samples and the nostalgia they induce. The album’s aspiration-over-inspiration approach is made clear by “This Is My Year,” which features Rick Ross, Big Sean, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, and Combs ad-libbing as Puff Daddy. The verses get more and more rigid and colorless as they go on. Big Sean is “going over blueprints” in the boardroom, and Rick Ross has Forbes on his mind, rapping, “305 the code if you wanna get a block / You can send in Bitcoins, time to triple it with stocks.” Making money in rap used to be fun, but in the uber-capitalist realm of nonstop advancement that dominates Khaled’s mind, it’s all work.
Blame some of that on contemporary rap’s forebears, who, in middle age, have turned to old-money methods as a sign of maturity—none more so than New York City’s hip-hop kingpins Jay-Z and Nas. The two team up on “Khaled Khaled” to take venture-capitalist raps to new lows on “Sorry Not Sorry,” a celebratory toast that appropriates the language of the sarcastic non-apology for one-percenter consumption. The pair have rarely sounded so bored or so didactic, rapping about cryptocurrencies, Silicon Valley, and angel investments with the smugness of a late-night infomercial pushing a pyramid scheme. In these verses, settling into the lap of luxury isn’t glamorous; it’s a cold, lifeless calculus. The same is true of the single “Popstar,” Drake’s lamest-possible engagement with his celebrity profile. In what is among the most listless performances of his career, the Toronto idol reels off the stats accumulated by his mounting success with a shrug. “Crown in my hand and I’m really playin’ keep-away / Shit don’t even usually get this big without a Bieber face,” he raps.
Drake embodies the effortless, ceaseless hitmaking of Khaled’s “another one” slogan. He has had throwaways top the charts before, but not even his singles tallied a No. 1 song for Khaled this cycle. According to current projections, “Khaled Khaled” will go No. 1, but with a dramatic decrease in streams and sales from his previous album—a pyrrhic victory. No one knows how to spin better than Khaled, and he’ll likely use the top-of-the-charts tanking to shout “We the best” through a megaphone. But if he isn’t an artist, an entertainer, or a booster, what’s left?
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