“I was just telling everybody that’s been around me, I’m like, ‘Yo, is it me or this energy is happening again?’” he says. Lately, he’s been on another hot streak, as his musings from his home and, more recently, the golf course have become social media sensations. Since his first posts on Snapchat, in 2015, Khaled has tapped into the zeitgeist by simply being himself. Khaled excels at bringing his deep well of playful energy to social media, where his witticisms have the same staying power as the hip-hop hits he’s so astute at constructing: “Another One,” “Major Key,” “Cloth Talk,” the list goes on. He does a few takes before landing on the one that his 37 million Instagram followers will eventually see. Before we start our first interview, he gets inspired to film a clip for Instagram, pausing for a moment before a new catchphrase comes to him: “Call me tangerine!” he says, referring to his new factory-diamond Rolex with an orange bezel the color of a tangerine. But he’s largely instinctive in his delivery - in plucking whatever he’s trying to convey from his brain and placing it into yours. When he’s trying to muster up the right word, either for clarity or comedic timing, his eyes carry a piercing seriousness, like an athlete laser-focused on a play. His beard follows sharp angles that enforce a perfect symmetry along his face. When you hear him chant his name - stretching the syllables in the word “DJ” to their phonetic limit - you know it’s going to be a banger. Khaled’s relentless positivity is by now a part of the DNA of popular culture. All he does is win, as he emphatically told us in 2010, and his hustler’s intuition has laid the foundation for a decades-long career working alongside some of the biggest names in music, from Jay-Z and Beyoncé to Drake, Justin Bieber, and Rihanna. In the rap community, he’s been a reliable source of hits rooted in the rags-to-riches ethos of the genre. Khaled, 47, has made a life out of motivation. The kind of music people play “to motivate themselves, to sing or rap along to,” he says. On an August afternoon in Miami, in the living room of the more-than-12,000-square-foot South Beach mansion he’s affectionately dubbed “the Resort,” Khaled cues up “Heart of the City.” He says it’s the type of energy that he wants from his upcoming 14th studio album, Til Next Time. Namely The Blueprint, the 2001 opus that helped solidify Hov as a commercial juggernaut in hip-hop. Lately, DJ Khaled has been listening to a lot of Jay-Z.
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