It's not what you said in your hit-record adlib; it's how you said it.
On DJ Khaled, yelling, and curiosity.
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Helloooo Sternal Journalists,
Today, in Chapter 3ish of What We The Best About When We The Best About DJ Khaled, I thought more about one of the questions people often ask about him:
“Why does he say his name on every one of his songs?”
This is generally asked rhetorically, with a heavy implication of “he does not need to be doing that, and it’s obnoxious.”
And while I won’t fight you on whether or not it’s obnoxious, only tonight did I first consider that this question could be non-rhetorical.
What if it wasn’t “Ugh, why does he say his name on every one of his songs? It’s annoying,” but more of a “Hmmm, why does he say his name on every one of his songs? I wonder what that adds.”
Sidenote: I’ve recently listened to and read a handful of interviews and articles that delved into the importance of curiosity, and how we neurologically lose a propensity towards it (curiosity) as we get older. Most of what I read/heard implied that, while you can’t go full baby-curious at all times, the more you try to practice curiosity, the better you feel and function.
As an oft-comedian, curiosity is complicated. You absolutely need it to find unique premises, but at some point, most comics get to skewering which is a very uncurious thing to do. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake skewering, but I am trying to embrace curiosity more.
With that in mind, I really attacked this question with all of my proverbial curiosity-holes wide open. What reasons could he possibly have for shouting his name on his records?
Obviously, it’s a marketing move. And DJ Khaled is a very good marketer. But I think that, as a great marketer, he knows that his job is easier when he has a great product, so I truly don’t believe he would do it on every single song if he didn’t think it positively affected the song.
And while I have a bit of a blindspot here because I do actually enjoy hearing his adlibs—especially on his best songs—this actually helps my case curiosity-wise.
Because I know that thinks it makes the song better, and I think it makes the song better. And that gets us to the question I’ve never heard (which makes it extra-curious):
Why does hearing DJ Khaled’s name on DJ Khaled songs make DJ Khaled songs better?
Answer: I don’t know, but my one theory (so far) is that he isn’t just saying his name on every record. He’s yelling his name on every record.
When I realized that, I used my extremely impressive skill of googling weird phrasings to find exactly the article I’m looking for and searched “do we like yelling?”
That brought me to this Time article about the brain and screaming, and specifically a 2015 study which found that our brains process screams different than we do other vocalizations:
“Normally, your brain takes a sound you hear and delivers it to a section of your brain dedicated to making sense of these sounds: What is the gender of the speaker? Their age? Their tone?
Screams, however, don’t seem to follow that route. Instead, the team discovered that screams are sent from the ear to the amygdala, the brain’s fear processing warehouse, says Poeppel.”
First of all, I’m sure this amygdala is useful, but boy could it use a rebrand—“Come on down to the Amygdala, your brain’s fear processing warehouse. Don’t forget to bring your screams!”
Second of all—this depot of horrors is not only dedicated to processing fear. It also, according to the article, “heightens awareness.”
So fear or not, screams and yelling essentially make someone’s ears perk up and direct their attention to whoever just did screamed. And whether you like that DJ Khaled uses this to get people to pay attention when one of his songs is on, it clearly works.
So the next time you hear a DJ Khaled song, don’t immediately roll your eyes. Stop and ask yourself what hearing those adlibs does for you, good or bad.
Be curious. Don’t ignore it. Because it’s a good way to live, but also because you can’t ignore it. He will be yelling during his song, and that will set off alarm bells in your brain’s terror repository.
Wishing you a very curious week.
All the love,
Julian
Recommendations
P.S. Oops! Quick, brief recommendations because I nearly forgot!
-See In The Heights!
-Listen to this song I just saw my sister listening to on Spotify and am now enjoying!
-Also listen to this Ezra Klein episode about what we learn about human intelligence from artificial intelligence!