NIGHTLIFE

The honest DJ Superstar DJ Keoki tells it like it is

Jack Colton

Naturally, none of this comes as a surprise to Keoki, who has been making media waves for nearly 25 years. The Weekly caught up with Superstar DJ Keoki for his first interview in more than a year, and found him on the positive side of the fence: "If you're a DJ, and you don't like how things are in the business, then you are in a position to change them. Don't just complain about them."

That pretty much sums up both his mentality and his career. This is, after all, the man who was somewhat responsible for the creation of the electro-clash genre. "Electro-clash is totally just a term," he says. "It's just a way for record labels to figure out what section of the store to put your album in." Coming out of New York and not denying his strong influence on the style, Keoki explains, "I was constantly playing for cultural, young hipsters who were somewhat jaded in the musical sense, and that forced me to play something new and honest just to keep them interested. I just did what I did, and that is all electro-clash is for me."

Starting his career decades ago as a busboy at New York's Club Area, Keoki was constantly looking for his shot at the turntables. "I kept asking the manager to let me play," he says, "but he would just tell me to shut up and do my job." Luck was eventually on his side, as the resident DJ didn't make it to work one night, and Keoki's manager walked up and told him, "I don't give a damn what you play, just keep the room packed and keep people drinking." Naturally, Keoki played exactly what he would have wanted to hear, and by 4 a.m. the room was still packed, and all his manager could say was, Keoki recalls, "All right kid, good job. Here is 50 bucks."

Twenty years and literally thousands of gigs later, Keoki is now one of the most popular DJs in the world, and he has earned a reputation for many things, good and bad. This has helped him garner the attention of the mainstream media, and has even led to controversial movies being produced that were partly based on his life (heard of Party Monster?). "None of that has ever really bothered me, because if you name it, I've heard it a million times. I've heard the same story in about 50 cities that I've passed out on the turntables. People even swear up and down that they saw it themselves. First off, that's never happened, and how the hell could you pass out in that many cities? That's just ridiculous." While he doesn't necessarily claim that he has been portrayed entirely unfairly over the years, he explains that his public perception is merely due to his honesty. "If you ask me if I did a line, I'll tell you I did a line. People see that and run with it."

At his last performance at the now-defunct Ice Metaclub, Keoki had a similar run-in with security that left him bruised and in handcuffs. "I had always hoped that Ice would someday make me a resident, and I even looked at them as a family." Keoki tells us that a fan had asked him to take his shirt off for a picture, and security quickly pounced on the situation. "They saw me and thought I was just some thug with tattoos, grabbed me like I was drunk. ... It didn't matter that they didn't know who I was, that shouldn't happen to anyone."

Fortunately that didn't tarnish his view of Las Vegas, and Superstar DJ Keoki is back in full effect at Seamless Afterhours every Thursday for his first residency in more than eight years. "I love Vegas. It's a real city. You can actually have a cigarette and a drink at the same time." Even with his great love for our city, Keoki feels that you can go to any club in Vegas to hear the same music, and he plans to change that. "Vegas needs something that will cause people to gather around and get excited. We are putting something together that will be unlike anything else around." While we've heard that a time or two before, we're willing to afford the reluctant father of electro-clash the benefit of the doubt.

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