A strobe of light dances off trees in the Santa Barbara mountains as the Egyptian Lover takes the decks. It’s the weekend before Halloween, high time for the freaks to descend. The Egyptian Lover steps into the booth, cutting his iconic figure against the night sky — Kangol hat on backward, Roland TR-808 drum machine operating as an extra appendage — L.A.’s most mythic figure of freakiness rising. The scene: A vaguely bohemian indie-electronic festival running rampant with stoned college kids dressed as Velma and Scooby, tech-house bros and aging Burners looking for a dopamine hit. It’s not immediately the kind of vibe that feels compatible with the famously raunchy electro-hop that the Egyptian Lover pioneered in the 1980s, defining an era of L.A. partying and shaping the West Coast hip-hop scene that would come after. But this infectious sound and the Egyptian Lover himself are their own universes, have been for a long time. A crowd connects because they have no other choice but to connect— even now, he holds a mystique that feels older than the pyramids. Build it and they will come.
Think of an Egyptian Lover set as a piece of performance art that takes you somewhere both far away and eerily familiar — yesterday, tomorrow, Egypt, South-Central. There is rapping, there is pop-locking, there is scratching, there is narrative and character. Each set is an homage to a version of the past that was always drawing from the future, leaving you on a unique energetic plane. Tonight, he’s pulling from the same record bag that he built 40 years ago — his earliest influences being inflection points in his set: Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” Prince, Kraftwerk. He sings into the mic as he plays his hits — “Egypt Egypt,” “My House (On the Nile).” He scans the crowd as his fingers do the kind of inconceivable tricks on the turntables that cemented him as one of the greats, embodying one of this most famous songs (“What Is a D.J. if He Can’t Scratch”), and plays his drum machine live with his sunglasses on in the pitch black, clear that he’s connecting to source. “Santa Barbara freaaaaaaaks,” the Egyptian Lover says into the mic. “Santa Barbara freaaaaaaaks,” the angels, monsters and Luigis in the crowd parrot back to him.
Most of the people at the festival weren’t even born when the Egyptian Lover possessed crowds of 10,000 at the L.A. Sports Arena when headlining for legendary party crew Uncle Jamm’s Armyin the early ’80s, his combination of turntable skills, scent of his Jheri curl activator and burgeoning Lothario aura creating an intoxicating vibe soup that inspired collective frenzy. But his lore, his legend is felt here and everywhere else. When I tell a friend I’m writing about the Egyptian Lover, she starts dancing like a pharaoh, hands jutting in opposite directions. When I tell my mom I’m writing about the Egyptian Lover, she instinctively starts singing, “Egypt / Egypt / Egyptian Lover,” pairing it with a reflexive pop-lock, ingrained from her days dancing to his music at clubs in Tijuana.
There’s a delicate balance between then and now for the Egyptian Lover, who goes by Egypt for those in the know. But the mistake people make is their idea of the Egyptian Lover existing strictly in terms of the past — a nostalgia act. Egypt embraces his past, keeps it as close to his chest as he does his 808. He’s never been one of those artists who wants to escape the thing that made him popular in the first place, feeling creatively imprisoned by his impact and then pivoting, only never to be heard from again. He made this world from scratch — where freakiness was encouraged, where hieroglyphics including camels, pyramids, the Eye of Horus, ankh and pharaohs are part of the visual language, where nasty lyrics paired with an entrancing electro beat are the formula. And he’s brought that world with him wherever he goes. Over his 40-year career, he’s never stopped touring. In the last few months alone he’s played nearly 20 cities across the globe.
Earlier this year, independent book publisher Bob Dominguez released an archival photobook celebrating 40 years of the Egyptian Lover’s seminal album, “On the Nile,” after working on it for two years. (808 copies of the book, also called “On the Nile,” were released total.) It charts the Egyptian Lover’s rise through old photos, from the artist’s personal collection, where the gold chains are stacked, curls are juicy, chest hair is popping and the windbreaker tracksuits are scratchy. It features interviews with L.A. musical icons who were there when it happened, including the Arabian Prince, Ice-T, Dām-Funk, and those watching his rise from afar, giving shape and understanding to what was happening in L.A., including Detroit legend Moodymann. It features hand-written parts of his history, drawings, old party fliers, lyrics jotted down from the album. Seeing all of the ephemera in one place, it strikes you how many layers and how much time it takes to truly build a world and an identity, how strong you have to be in your artistry and conviction to hold onto it for decades after.
“I don’t even want to stop,” the Egyptian Lover says into the mic on stage in Santa Barbara. “I’ve been in this s— for 40 years. Oh, yeah. I’m loving it. I’m loving it.”
Born Greg Broussard in 1963, the Egyptian Lover grew up on the east side of South-Central in a house where the record collection included Dean Martin, the O’Jays, Barry White, Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra. The classics. Broussard’s father, Creole from Louisiana, was objectively fly — “the Rat Pack guy” — a photo from the book shows him in a slick black turtleneck under a suit jacket, long pendant chain hanging down to his torso. His mother, once a choir singer and one of 16 children, had generational roots in Watts and Compton. She was supportive of her son’s burgeoning musical interests, lending him the $600 he needed to buy his first drum machine, effectively changing the course of his life and the state of L.A. music as we know it. His brother, David Broussard, is a musician, too, and served as his earliest influence — he played the saxophone and read music, encouraging his brother to hone in on his practice. “He didn’t know how to DJ, but he taught me how to DJ — he taught me everything,” Egypt says. “I was listening to this record. He said, ‘Start it over, only listen to the bass line.’ I’d never heard that before. He said, ‘Start it over, only listen to the drums.’ Now I heard the record in layers. When I started making music, I made it in those layers.”
The name, legend and sound of the Egyptian Lover drew from the lure of the unknown, from pop culture. It was an amalgamation of his favorite artists, infused with a genetic code that was specific to L.A. The Nile was a place far away enough from the violence of his neighborhood, where gunshots were par for the course and the streets were being hit hard by the crack epidemic. He was also an aspiring Casanova, inspired by the swag of silent film actor Rudolph Valentino, known as the Latin Lover. Egypt was moved by the Dean Martin records his dad had at home — they showed him how an artist could create a unique imprint for themselves. “No matter what record you pick out of his career, they all sounded the same. They had that Dean Martin sound — that signature,” Egypt says. “I said, ‘If I was an artist, I would do that. Every record I make will be my style — the Egyptian Lover style, not the West Coast, not the East Coast, but the Egyptian Lover style.’” (The world-building has been so strong that to this day, people still make the mistake of thinking he’s from Egypt. He’s traveled the world playing music, but that’s one place he still hasn’t made it to.)
Broussard was shy growing up, and his way of getting to know people — or, more specifically, meeting women — was by making mixtapes and selling them with his friend and classmate Snake Puppy (a future hip-hop pioneer who would go on to be part of L.A.’s Dream Team), at James Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley. Even the bus driver bought the Egyptian Lover’s mixtapes, which pulled everyone from Rod Stewart to Rick James into the same universe. “I had one turntable, one cassette player, a boombox and I was just making the best mixtape ever,” he remembers. “I put a rap on an instrumental song, ‘Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.’ I was selling that at my high school for $5 and then it got so popular one of my friends said, ‘Man, it’s supply and demand. You’re selling out before you get to school. Double the price for $10.’ Ten dollars is a lot in 1979.”
At the time, Uncle Jamm’s Army, led by master programmer and promoter Rodger Clayton, was throwing the most legendary functions in L.A. The Egyptian Lover as we know him today was born of that ecosystem. His technical skill was instinctual and his style was unmatched — up until this point, scratching was mostly an East Coast thing. Under Egypt’s steady hand, each zip of a record sounded like an incantation. “[Fellow Uncle Jamm’s Army DJ] Bobcat always called me the devil,” Egypt remembers. “He was like, ‘There’s no way you can do these things that you’re doing.’” After a few months of DJing with Uncle Jamm’s, another member, Gid Martin, came up to him and said, “Between me and you, people are only paying to get in to see if you’re DJing. They’re coming to see you.”
Egypt tells the story of how he discovered the Roland TR-808 drum machine for the first time the way someone recalls meeting the love of their life — half of it prescriptive, every inflection point memorized; the other half still novel and almost unbelievable, the miracle of discovering a foundational truth about yourself for the first time. Egypt felt something kindred in listening to “Planet Rock,” the genre-bending anthem by East Coast hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. When he met Afrika Islam, Bambaataa’s mentee, he told him that the track was made using a drum machine. A drum machine? He’d heard of drum sets, never drum machines. “I went to the Guitar Center in Hollywood to buy it and I asked the clerk, ‘Can you show me how to program it?’ So I made ‘Planet Rock’ over and I was listening to it on these big amplifiers. I started changing the beat up a little bit and doing crazy stuff — just trying it and it was working. That’s when the clerk said, ‘Don’t turn around.’ So I turned around and I saw all these rock and roll guys who I’ve seen on MTV before looking at me, dancing and clapping. Like, ‘Whoa.’”
The night he played his 808 live for the first time at an Uncle Jamm’s Army party in 1983 is “what transformed Egypt from a DJ to an artist,” Egypt’s brother, David, is quoted as saying in Dominguez’s book. The crowd was screaming his name while dancing, wholly possessed by the deeply ancestral, bewitchingly robotic beat of the drum machine coming from Uncle Jamm’s Army’s regular set-up — a temple of sound worship made up of 100 Cerwin Vega speakers. It was this moment, in part, that would spark a meteoric rise for Egypt, resulting in nearly a dozen albums (the latest of which was made this year), KDAY programmer Greg Mack playing his songs on a loop on the radio, and becoming the label boss of Egyptian Empire Records. “To this day, I still do my concerts based on the last hour of the Sports Arena,” Egypt says.
Egypt’s brand of electro is as physical as it is mental, the first time you hear it, it’s forever ingrained. Dominguez, who was born years after Egypt’s debut “On the Nile” came out, remembers driving around his hometown of Logan Heights in San Diego as a kid with his dad, who would play the Egyptian Lover as an education. “Egypt just caught my ear as a kid,” Dominguez, who also works in culture marketing at Nike, remembers. “Skipping up a few years, in high school when I’m independent through my music, I remember having “Egypt Egypt” on my iPod Nano. This was the song to big me up. Like, ‘I’m in the mix. I’m in it.’”
There is one thing that can be agreed upon: the Egyptian Lover is, has always been, that guy. In the book, there are photos of him in high school, posing with two women flanking either side of him. “He’s one of the best DJs in the world, especially still mixing vinyl, and he holds his own to all these guys who are basically sticking a USB in something,” his childhood friend AJ Kirby says. I get to our interview early, watch Egypt get out of his BMW from my rearview mirror and head into Mexican haunt El Cholo’s South Park location he’s been coming to for the last few years whenever he needs a quiet place to talk business. When I walk into the empty restaurant a couple minutes later, he’s sitting in a corner booth holding court, chips and salsa already on the table. The servers seem to know him. He just got back from Croatia, where over the years he’s played festivals like Love International and Dimensions. I follow his Instagram where he gives updates on tour. One of the most recent: “Berlin…. Yall ready?”
Egypt shows me a video of a festival he played in Latvia. It’s the part of his set where he does a call and response with the crowd. A wall of thousands of bodies, not a phone in sight, are in total admiration, locked into the moment. “8-0-mothaf—-8,” they scream in reverence of Egypt’s drum machine. “8-0-muthaf—-8.” The energy is overwhelming, even through a video. It’s easy to see why touring, despite being hard on anyone, especially someone who has been doing this for decades, would drive him all these years. There’s nothing like affecting a crowd with your sound — which for Egypt’s has transcended its birthplace (L.A.), even its metaphorical birthplace (Egypt), and has gone global.
An August Virgo with no agent and an ability to respond to emails at lightning speed, Egypt has been doing his own booking for years. Since retiring from the police force, his childhood friend and former neighbor, Kirby, has been touring with him. In Santa Barbara, he was hawking some of Egypt’s records and apparel, including a letterman jacket that has the words “FREAK-A-HOLIC” running down the arm sleeve. Each show is a chance to return to the self, remind people of the story he’s telling. Egypt recalls the time he opened for Afrika Bambaataa. He wanted to see the artist perform “Planet Rock” live, but he went in a completely different direction, abandoning his hit completely. The moment stuck with Egypt for years. “I wanted to see why he is who he is,” he recalls. “He didn’t show us that. I realized I had to show them why I am who I am.”
Egypt is self-assured and funny, cocky in a clear-eyed way. Even in his 60s, his “pyramid playboy” persona remains. There seems to be an understanding that artists like the Egyptian Lover exist in relation to their environment: In the ’80s when Egypt was DJing for thousands, a dance called “The Freak” was king — glorified grinding. While one of the main references, Prince, might have been nasty in a subtle way, songs rife with double entendre, Egypt was just nasty. Each song became permission for the crowd to become embodied: “Give me a freaky, kinky nation with a total female population / I can deal with that situation / I don’t care about my reputation,” he raps on stage in Santa Barbara to “Egypt Egypt.” Even his earworm “Dirty Passionate Yell,” released earlier this year on his “1987” album, proclaims: “I can do the things your lover can’t do / Fly you places and just spoil you / I can keep you happy every day and every night / With this ultra-freaky appetite.”
The lyrics in Egyptian Lover’s first album, “On the Nile,” served as a kind of manifestation of his last four decades in the game: “I’m the Egyptian Lover, baby / I’m number one / I’m a mixing-scratching-rappin’-lovin’-son-of-a-gun.” These days, Egypt lives what some might see as a double life. He’s been married since the ’90s, raising two stepdaughters and taking on the role of “Papa” to three grandkids who despite having no blood relation to Egypt look exactly like him. They’re close. He doesn’t have turntables or a studio in his house but he does have a playroom stacked with toys for his grandchildren.
The story of how he met his wife was its own kind of kindred moment, an encounter that would unknowingly carve out his path as an artist. Right after graduating high school, he was living in his parents’ backhouse and courting one of his classmates. One day, she came over and shared a new album she’d stumbled across, Kraftwerk’s “Computer World.” She asked Egypt to make a tape of it so they could both have a copy. When he heard it for the first time, it shifted something in his cellular makeup. He didn’t know music could sound like this. The German electronic band would become one of his musical touchstones forever more. “It blew me away. Like, ‘What is this?’ This is futuristic.” He ended up keeping the record and she kept the tape. After that, they lost touch. He became a touring musician, and she married someone else. Then his 10-year high school reunion happened and they ran into each other again. How could he ever forget the girl who showed him Kraftwerk? “I said, ‘Where’s your husband?’ She said, ‘I’m separated.’ We went on a date and got married,” Egypt remembers. Even with his grueling schedule, he tries not to be on tour for more than a couple weeks at a time. He’s a family man now.
“I think he’s honestly the busiest now since he’s been since the late ’80s,” Dominguez says about Egypt. In between tour dates earlier this year, he released a song with producer Josh Baker and Rome Fortune, “Dr. Feel Right.” He’s also in the process of completing his next album, set to be out mid-next year.
There’s a lineage of L.A. DJs who would arguably not be here if it wasn’t for the Egyptian Lover ripping all those years ago. He still serves as supreme inspiration. At the release party for the archival photobook, “On the Nile,” held at Peanut Butter Wolf’s Highland Park vinyl bar, the Gold Line, L.A. DJ Spiñorita watched in reverence as Egypt signed copies of the book. His music is a mainstay in any set she plays. “The Egyptian Lover is such a legend that it goes off anywhere,” she says, but especially for what she calls a “Dodgers crowd,” in other words, L.A. people. “It’s become part of who I am as a DJ. I will say that on the mic, ‘Where the freaks at?’ The crowd gets this excited feeling of: ‘We’re free, we’re here, we’re dancing, we’re being who we want to be, we’re feeling sexy.’”
Egypt’s music has been passed down through eras, generations, places, each group or moment claiming something about it as their own. “I’ll do some concerts, and all I’ll see is young kids singing the words to the song,” Egypt says. “I’m like, ‘This is so cool.’” On New Year’s Eve, Egyptian Lover plays on home turf at Zebulon. The New Year’s Eve show in L.A. has become a kind of tradition. It’s fitting: He was always the person meant to connect our past with the future. The ‘80s to infinity.
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