My Beat Still Goes Boom: An Interview with Electro Legend The Egyptian Lover
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My Beat Still Goes Boom: An Interview with Electro Legend The Egyptian Lover

The Los Angeles veteran discusses influencing Dr. Dre and his latest 80s compilation on Stones Throw Records.

All roads lead back to Kraftwerk, at least that's how the conventional narrative of electro music goes. However, Greg Broussard, known best as The Egyptian Lover, knows a little secret about the Teutonic techno titans that originated that swinging robotic sound.

Given the German group's palpable influence on American hip-hop in the early 1980s, it's interesting to hear him insinuate that they may have borrowed from his sound. Kraftwerk were spending a fair amount of time in Los Angeles during those days, some of it at Warner Bros. offices. According to a friend of Broussard's who worked for the label, they overheard "Yes Yes Yes" by Uncle Jamm's Army, the rap crew that he was a member of.

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"They loved it and they were writing stuff down," he says. "I wonder if I inspired them."

A credited co-writer on "Yes Yes Yes," Broussard included the song and its similarly iconic B-side "Dial-A-Freak" on Egyptian Lover 1983-1988, an ambitious new 22-song compilation from Stones Throw Records, which collects Egyptian Lover material from his own Freak Beat and Egyptian Empire imprints. The project was several years in the making, first meeting label founder Peanut Butter Wolf in 2008 during a visit to the label's offices with friend and former N.W.A. member Arabian Prince. "He was a real cool dude and told me how a big of a fan he was," he says of Wolf, who commissioned an Egyptian Lover remix of James Pants' "Cosmic Rapp" shortly thereafter.

Broussard's connection with the label continued as he began DJing and performing at official Stones Throw gigs and showcases. Yet he was reluctant to go much further. Wolf offered to put out an anthology of the early Freak Beat and Egyptian Empire material. Broussard's response? "Let me think about it." Another year passed before they spoke on it seriously again, in the midst of self-releasing 2015's 1984, and finally he relented. "I could feel [Wolf] had his heart into it," he says. "I knew he would do it the right way.

Releasing this music through Stones Throw marks a rare departure for an artist with an independent streak, something that informed his release strategy as far back as thirty years. At one point, Wolf had been keen to get an all-new Egyptian Lover record out of Broussar, an idea he rejected idea outright. Apart from a brief stint at Priority Records in the late 1980s, he's kept his career a largely in-house affair, having watched friends sign to labels, then complain of shelved albums and stalled singles. "I needed the control because I didn't want anyone telling me what to do or when the records came out," Brousard says.

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Not long into our conversation, he casually acknowledges the obvious: the long-running Egyptian Lover is indeed an act, a performative routine in the established tradition of funk lotharios. As his popularity rose into the mid-80s, so did the expectations of his fan base to maintain the larger-than-life and hypersexual persona.

"Whatever the song said, I gotta live that life," he says. "If I'm going to the parties, I've got to wear all the diamond rings and the necklaces, drive a Benzo with the big rims and sound system." Dripping with excess, Broussard found himself compelled to be in character and stay there, not that he much minded rolling up to clubs with two women under each arm.

Whether or not he's the Persian Sex God he purports to be on "Dial-A-Freak" or "Kinky Nation," that in no way diminishes what he's accomplished in that capacity. Take for example, comedians like Andy Kaufman, Andrew "Dice" Clay, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Gilbert Gottfried, each of whom built careers on apparent character work that often wasn't apparent to their audiences, frequently blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

Even today, it can be hard to make these distinctions between Broussard and The Egyptian Lover, and even more challenging to determine if that much matters three decades into a career. For example, when prompted about the rationale behind his overtly sexual lyrics, he shifts to a backstory that could belong to either person. "I was always a nasty guy, just a freaky guy," he says, citing Prince as an artist whose carnally voracious approach to lyricism immediately connected with him.

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You can hear the Purple One's influence throughout The Egyptian Lover's catalogue. The breathing employed on late 1970s Prince singles "Soft And Wet" and "Sexy Dancer" begat the rhythmic integration of breath into The Egyptian Lover's own material, a signature that adds a human physicality to the ostensibly Kraftwerk-indebted template. Years later, with the benefit of retrospect, Broussard is the living and breathing argument both for and against sticking to one's proverbial guns as an artist. An electro aesthete with an ascetic streak, he matter-of-factly explains that he still works with much of the same analogue gear he did decades prior.

The release of an anthology like 1983-1988 presents a range of opportunities. It's a chance for discovery and rediscovery, of course, but also of critical assessment and reassessment. Listening to the cocky come-ons of "My House (On The Nile)" or the playful cut-ups of "Ultimate Scratch," it's certain that Broussard's work influenced and informed contemporaries and successors alike, not the least of which being Dr. Dre.

It's important to remember that there was a time when Broussard was a much bigger name than Dre, playing live to some 10,000 attendees at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena with Uncle Jamm's Army. He recalls one such gig where he first incorporated a freshly acquired Roland TR-808 live in his set. "Nobody knew what a drum machine was," he says, referring to the crowd as well as himself. "I bought it, brought it home, programmed it full of beats, and brought it to the party." Audience members assumed he was DJing, screaming and begging to know the name of the record that didn't even exist. "It was mind-blowing," he recalls of this turning point in an already successful hip-hop career. "Everybody thought it was a record, so I went on to make records."

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It wasn't long before Dre was copping that breathy flow from Broussard. "I got kinda mad, like, he stole my sound!," he says. "Everybody was saying it was the West Coast sound, but it was Egyptian Lover sound!" But whether Dre borrowed, co-opted, or outright stole The Egyptian Lover's shine, only one of these men is a household name today. It's highly doubtful that Dre would be the multi-millionaire industry mogul and rap impresario the world knows him as had he forever adhered to the style of the World Class Wreckin' Cru or for that matter N.W.A. The ebullient schtick Broussard holds fast to as a matter of principle and artistic devotion assuredly offers intangible benefits, but it stands to reason that he could've done at least some of what Dre did.

Broussard doesn't speak like a man with regrets. To him, electro is still its own reward, and it brings him joy to spread it. He continues to play Egyptian Lover shows all over the world, bringing that 808 bump and vocoder funk to a wide range of crowds. "They've got the phones in the air to Shazam it," he says. "It's good to see young kids hear this music for the first time and feel the way people used to feel about it back in the day."

Egyptian Lover 1983-1988 is out now on Stones Throw Records.

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Gary Suarez is on Twitter.