![]() He's played a serious role in the hip-hop industry throughout his career, yet he's perceived almost exclusively as a meme by fans across the nation. He's perhaps the most quoted figure in hip-hop, able to create viral catch phrases with an ease that marketing executives dream about. He's released eight full-length albums but doesn't actually rap on any of them. On paper, Khaled's career doesn't make a whole lot of sense. "I'm proud to be a small part of whatever he is today." He pauses before asking, "I don't even know what he is now. Holzenthal looks at Khaled now with a mix of pride and, like most people, confusion. "I don't know when he discovered where the switch was, but as soon as he found it, he flipped it and he turned on DJ Khaled." Some 20 years later, Holzenthal turned on the TV and saw a very different Khaled Khaled. "I think that may have been how we ended our professional relationship," Holzenthal says. He had been moving the phone when the boss wasn't around. There was Khaled, sneakers kicked up on the desk and the phone pressed to his ear, caught in the act. Holzenthal marched to his office - a glorified closet - and swung open the door. When he walked in, he noticed the phone was missing from the front of the store. Then one day he dropped by the store unannounced. To make sure it wouldn't happen again, he unplugged the phone in his back office and moved it to the front of the shop.Ī few weeks passed without incident, and Holzenthal - who ran two locations - nearly forgot about the whole thing. He knew it was one of his employees but decided not to make a fuss. Someone had been using the office phone to contact record labels in New York. "I'm looking at all these calls, and I'm like, I never called these people." "I knew when I was a kid this is what I wanted to do, and there's nothing else I wanted to do more." tweet thisīut a few months later, Holzenthal noticed something weird about his phone bill. After their initial Abbott and Costello routine, Khaled Mohamed Khaled flew mostly under the radar. "That kind of freaked me out, you know?" Holzenthal says, trying his best to remember the encounter 23 years later. "So when I write the check out to you, I'm writing Khaled Khaled on the check?" "What do you mean 'Khaled Khaled'? What's your last name?" Holzenthal pulled him aside to fill out some paperwork his first day on the job. Baggy clothes hid a lumpy frame, and his eyes, coffee black, looked slightly melted, microwaved until just warm. He doesn't remember how exactly the then-18-year-old came to work at Odyssey Records, Holzenthal's tiny store in the Carrollton Shopping Plaza in Mid-City New Orleans. "We have had our fair share of characters, but as far as I remember, at least in the workplace, Khaled wasn't one of those guys," Holzenthal says. Of all the words in all the land one could use to describe DJ Khaled, Gary Holzenthal chose "quiet." It would have been less jarring to learn that his best friend was a llama.
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