When DJ Khaled sailed off on that jet ski I wish he’d never come back
Or at least permanently lost his iPhone
Will LloydIt dawned on my recently, as I reluctantly vibed with DJ Khaled on the treadmill, in the sauna and aboard the tour bus, that the world would be a better place if he had died a few weeks ago.
The situation a few weeks ago: Khaled is on a jet ski, the darkness is clerically black and he is completely, hopelessly lost. Somehow he has enough data to send snapchats but none to load up Google maps. He is telling us to always have faith, that the key is to make it, but there is fear in his voice.
The gloom is only lit by the torch on his phone and the metaphorical fire of the aphorisms he spews at the camera.
Between the desperate prayer hand emojis, the howling bluster of the wind, the mechanical whine of the jet ski – you think he’s going to snapchat story his own death.
And what a death, what a baller way to go it would have been. Rose gold iPhone in hand, monologuing as he sinks into the putrid depths of a Miami swamp, as hungry gators approach (major key: avoid gators – swim wit me as they try to bite my fucking head off).
But Khaled didn’t die a hero, and now he’s lived long enough for us to realise that his life is a portrait: a masterpiece of supercharged banality.
In fact, in its numbing vapidity, its circular routines, its virtuoso repetitiveness, Khaled’s life isn’t so different from yours, or mine. And that’s when you ask yourself – if this guy isn’t extraordinary – if all he does is eat fat plates of turkey sausage and ask Ben how business is, then why the fuck am I spending ten minutes a day watching him do these things?
The other night Khaled was in a club called Tao, in Las Vegas. He played a set and it was all Justin Bieber and Drake and Fatman Scoop.
You watch this, essentially a set that could be ripped from any shitty Leicester Square clubbing experience and you wonder where the mad beats and the twerking girls are.
It’s just Khaled snapchatting on his phone, the audience snapchatting on theirs, and you, snapchatting on yours.