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DJ KHALED ON AALAM OF GOD, TURNING 50, UNITY THROUGH MUSIC, AND WHAT COMES NEXT

                                                                                           BY VIOLET CAMACHO

                                                                       PHOTOGRAPHER ALBERTO GONZALEZ

There are few figures in music as instantly recognizable — or as relentlessly driven — as DJ Khaled. For more than two decades, he has been a cultural force, a master curator of sound and spirit whose voice has become an anthem of triumph and gratitude. Now, as he approaches his 50th birthday, Khaled steps into a defining chapter with Aalam of God, his first album in three years.

The project arrives with a powerful double release: “You Remind Me” — a monumental dancehall collaboration uniting Vybz Kartel, Buju Banton, Mavado, Bounty Killer, RoryStoneLove, and Kaylan Arnold — and “Brother” with Post Malone and YoungBoy Never Broke Again, a haunting and emotional ballad. Together, these tracks reflect Khaled’s vision of unity through music, his deep respect for legacy, and his unwavering ability to bring people together across genres and generations.

But Aalam of God is more than music. It’s a statement about family, faith, philanthropy, and the power of gratitude — the principles that have carried Khaled from Miami radio decks to Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. As he reflects on his journey and looks to the future, DJ Khaled opens up about legacy, community, and the lessons he hopes to pass on.

DJ Khaled is in motion before the recorder even clicks on—corralling the room, checking levels, making sure everyone can hear what matters. It’s not just the sound. It’s the message. Three years since his last release, with a milestone birthday around the corner and his annual We The Best x Jordan Golf Classic gearing up, Khaled is in a reflective place that still feels like a launchpad. “I roll with God,” he says at one point, matter-of-fact, like it’s the simplest logistics note in the world. For him, it is.

The new chapter centers on a title that first lands in your ear as a pun, then settles as a creed: Aalam of God. The name invokes family, faith, and a worldview. It nods to his sons, to gratitude, to the idea that music should clear out the noise instead of adding to it. “To make my fourteenth album called Aalam of God—that’s me showing gratitude, saying thank you,” he explains. “Sometimes we forget this is His world and we live in it.”

Across our conversation, Khaled returns to two pillars—
love and unity—and two early singles that set the tone for an album he believes will define his legacy so far: “You Remind Me” and “Brother.” One is a jubilant celebration of dancehall giants sharing the same space. The other is a tender message about brotherhood, and the tears that can come with truth told plainly. Together, they announce where Khaled is headed: forward, unapologetically, with feeling.

SETTING THE TONE AFTER THREE YEARS AWAY
Khaled didn’t creep back with one song. He returned with two, by design. “I wanted to set the tone,” he says. “‘You Remind Me’ and ‘Brother’—good vibes but also a message.”

“You Remind Me” has the architecture of an impossible record. Buju Banton, Bounty Killer, Mavado, Vybz Kartel, RoryStoneLove, and Kaylan Arnold all appear on one track—icons whose paths, histories, and long- standing constraints made a line-up like this feel out of reach for years. “They never all been on one record before,” Khaled says, still shaking his head at the improbability. Some were incarcerated. Others lacked visas. Live touring for some of dancehall’s biggest stars had been “locked up” for two decades. Then, a run of breakthroughs arrived almost at once: returns home, papers secured, flights booked, doors opening.

Khaled witnessed it cascade in real time—Buju landing back in the U.S. and driving straight from the jet to Khaled’s house, Vybz coming home and openly thanking God for his freedom, Bounty stepping off a plane in Miami and heading directly to the backyard to celebrate. “None of this was planned,” Khaled says. “That’s how God works. God is great.” Each visit bled into the next, each conversation turned into a verse, the song stitching itself together because the moment demanded it. “Unity is strength,” he adds. “Love is the key.”

The track also folds in a velvet touch of nostalgia. “I wanted something that feels good and brings you back to when we were coming up,” Khaled explains. There’s a familiar bassline at its core, the kind that floats across
a party and gets people moving before they know why. RoryStoneLove sets the tone on the intro, a wink to the dancehall sessions Khaled used to frequent. Kaylan Arnold—an emerging artist and songwriter—carries the hook. “While we celebrate dancehall, I wanted to bring back that feeling,” he says, a grin cutting across his face.

If “You Remind Me” is a reunion, “Brother” is a confession. The track brings Post Malone and YoungBoy Never Broke Again into Khaled’s orbit for a song that listeners have called “soul-touching.” Khaled had wanted
to work with YoungBoy for years. When he finally reached out about the album, the response came back fast. “Send that,” YoungBoy told him. “I’ll send it right back in an hour.” Twenty-seven minutes later, Khaled had the verse. Post Malone was mid-tour—Berlin, Denmark, Milan—so Khaled dispatched his engineer across Europe. “We can’t take no as an answer,” he says. Hook secured, file bounced, song mixed, record released the very next day. “We hadn’t even finished the record and were scheduled to drop,” he laughs. “But that’s confidence and vision.”

The pairing of the two singles is a statement. Joy and ache. Dancefloor and heart-check. Celebration and compassion.“Music has to touch your soul,” Khaled says. “That’s how you know you’re doing it right.”

“MAKE THE RECORDS”: BACK TO THE CRAFT
For all the meme-able bombast attached to his public persona, Khaled talks craft like a lifer. He is skeptical of a culture that treats music as marketing oxygen first and expression second. “People have to go back to making music,” he says, leaning forward. Not a swipe at anyone, he insists, but a course correction. “Make it the priority. Don’t worry about a critic or a podcast or a blog. Make the records.”

This is the axis on which Aalam of God turns. He wanted the first two records to “set the energy” before he opens the rest of the body of work—yes, there are more features coming, yes, the palette will broaden, but only after the foundation is poured. “When you hear the whole thing, you’re going to overstand what I’m saying,” Khaled promises. He likes that word— overstand. It implies a comprehension that lands deeper than intel or hype.

The album title itself started at home. Khaled’s wife heard him grinding daily, saw the work, and nudged him toward a name that holds their family close. He’d considered All Glory to God. He kept hearing the syllables of his son’s name—Aalam—inside the phrase. He remembered Buju singing a refrain that sounded like “Aalam of God.” It clicked. The title, he realized, says what the music is trying to do—thankfulness, love, unity— while grounding it in the world his sons will inherit.

“It’s not about me,” Khaled says. “It’s about all of us. It’s about music, life, showing gratitude to God’s world.”

LEGACY AT 50: FAMILY FIRST
Ask Khaled about legacy and he doesn’t start with plaques or streams. He starts with his kids. “That’s the legacy. Everything is for them,” he says. He remembers life before fatherhood and shakes his head. “When you become
a father, that’s when you start living real life. That’s when you enjoy it more because you get to witness the purest form of love.”

He sees himself and his wife in their sons, sees a future where the music becomes theirs to reimagine. He jokes about being 200 years old in the backyard eating a cheeseburger while they live out their dreams, but the message is earnest. “Mommy and daddy’s music legacy is yours,” he says. “We’re going to support whatever you want.”

That family lens reframes his public honors too. Standing onstage at the Caribbean Music Awards with Swizz Beatz to present the Icon Award to Bounty Killer felt less like an industry exchange and more like family business in the best sense. “He’s a true friend,” Khaled says of Bounty. “He loves you when things are great and when you go through hard times. He’s a real one.” To celebrate Bounty in the same season they’d cut “You Remind Me” together—another one of those God-timed circles.

Khaled hopes the next generation says one simple thing about him: He stayed true. “He didn’t blink and he didn’t fold,” he says. “He kept spreading love.” It sounds like a T-shirt slogan until you watch how Khaled moves—how he collaborates, how he talks to fans, how he raises money for kids—and realize that for him, love is not branding. It’s a practice.

GIVING BACK: THE WE THE BEST FOUNDATION
Khaled’s philanthropic impulse predates the paperwork. He grew up giving back because that’s how he was raised. The formal structure came later with the We The Best Foundation, which he runs with his wife Nicole. The foundation’s early heartbeat was Asahd’s birthday—turning his celebration into a celebration for many, a chance to collaborate with other charities and amplify good. This year brought a milestone: the We The Best Music Lab at the Overtown Youth Center in partnership with Alonzo Mourning. “Big for the community and, more importantly, big for the kids,” Khaled says.

The foundation’s signature event, the We The Best Jordan Golf Classic, now rolls into its third year happening on December 4, 2025. It’s a fund- raiser, yes, but also a nexus where other foundations, athletes, artists, and community leaders meet, trade ideas, and light new projects together. “That’s what I love,” he says. “We collaborate, then we keep supporting each other’s foundations after the event. We can do more together.”

As for how his Jordan partnership became part of that story, Khaled laughs. It didn’t happen overnight. He built the relationship for decades— checking in, showing the work, proving the fit. When the door opened, it opened wide. “It’s one thing to support a brand, another to live a brand,” he says. Team Jordan’s roster values uniqueness and impact, a frame in which Khaled feels right at home.

BEYOND THE STUDIO: FILM, RETAIL, AND THE HUSTLE THAT NEVER STOPPED
Khaled’s restless curiosity stretches far past the mixing board. “Growing up, I always wanted to be a music executive, an artist, a DJ, a producer,” he says. “Even as a kid, I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur.” He sold clothes out of his car and tapes out of his trunk, a grind he attributes to his parents, who ran clothing stores after building up from flea markets.

That ethic shows up in his expanding slate—restaurants, retail, entertainment, media. On the film side, Khaled is an executive producer on Killing Castro, directed by Eve Rivera, a longtime collaborator who once sketched cartoons of studio friends and later shot more than twenty of Khaled’s videos. The film, which recently secured a spot at the Toronto International Film Festival, dramatizes a chapter of history that surprised even Khaled. “I didn’t know nothing about the story till I saw the movie,” he says. The cast includes Al Pacino, a surreal credit for a first outing as an EP. More films are in the pipeline, with details to come.

Closer to home, the We The Best x Snipes store on South Beach is proof of concept for a retail vision he believes can scale. “I knew it would work, and it’s more than working,” he says. “In my mind, I can open twenty of these.” He’s not rushing, though. The point isn’t sprawl, it’s fit—brand-true experiences that extend the feeling of the music into everyday life.

When he points to models, he mentions JAY-Z and Roc Nation,
an ecosystem that integrates management, publishing, records, film, champagne, and more. Khaled isn’t trying to become someone else. He’s studying the discipline behind empire building—how to keep the center solid while the perimeter expands. “There’s no excuse not to get something done,” he says. “Especially the way the world is now. It’s all there for you.”

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AALAM OF GOD
Khaled’s faith threads through every topic—not as a sermon, but as an orientation. Gratitude isn’t a mood, it’s a method. When he went viral declaring “God did,” it resonated because it felt shared. “Everybody felt that,” he says. Aalam of God aims for the same place: a reminder that love and unity aren’t sentimental add-ons, they’re survival tools.

“Without love, you have hate,” Khaled says. “Because there’s hate, you gotta have love. I choose love.”

That choice is audible. “You Remind Me” insists on togetherness—old misunderstandings set aside, visas approved, voices once separated now woven into one rhythm. “Brother” insists on empathy—an arena-selling star in Post Malone, another who has overcome his own trials in YoungBoy, both telling a story that makes people cry in a good way. In their pairing, Khaled hears the album’s thesis: celebration and compassion.

For Khaled, unity isn’t an abstract hashtag. It arrives with people
on planes, with kids in music labs, with stores opening doors on South Beach, with the quiet work of a father and mother trying to make the path straighter for two little boys who will one day inherit the catalog and the cause. The music is how he says it loudest, though, and he knows how rare a record like “You Remind Me” can be. “These types of records don’t happen every day,” he says. “God had His hands on it.”

THE NEXT DECADE: STILL IN THE MEETING
Ask what fans can expect in the new era and Khaled offers a biography in motion. “I always knew I’d be an entrepreneur,” he repeats, as if rereading an old notebook entry. Music continues, yes, but so does film, fashion, retail, hospitality. The thread is work—the promise he made to himself years ago not to be out-worked by anyone when the goal is clear.

He laughs remembering how long he told his friends at Jordan, “Y’all watching me, right?” He laughs describing the rapid-fire recording sprints behind “Brother.” Laughter punctuates the grind in his stories because
the grind is fun now. He’s in love with the chase and the craft. “It’s college season again,” he says, meaning it’s time to sharpen, study, level up. Still in the meeting, as he likes to put it. Always.
And then there’s the birthday. Fifty. Some artists shy away from milestones, fearing they read as endings. Khaled treats his as a context.

The number won’t define the work. The work defines the work. When pressed to sum up the feeling that guides him into this season—album on deck, foundation growing, golf classic returning, film arm spinning up—he delivers a line that doubles as philosophy and litmus test.

“Win with us or watch us win.”
It’s not antagonistic. He insists it’s love. The point is to invite people into the possibility, to model a posture that treats others’ success as fuel rather than threat. “I always been inspired, never hated,” he says. “If I see somebody win, I know it’s possible. The ones who don’t root for you can watch. But the real ones? They win with us.”

Coda: Back to the Record
Before the interview winds down, Khaled circles to gratitude again. He thanks the artists who trusted him with “You Remind Me.”He salutes the team that shuttled files across continents to finish “Brother.” He calls the process “monumental” not because of charts, but because of timing—friends coming home, papers clearing, hearts softening, verses landing in minutes, hooks tracked between arena shows, a title born in a family conversation, an album built on intention rather than impulse.

“You can hear the joy,” he says. You can. You can hear the years too—the early days at community radio, the flea market hustle in his parents’ story, the first albums, the deals, the friendships held across decades, the wisdom earned through trial, the way becoming a father rearranged the furniture of his life so love sits in the middle of every room.