Background
Keoki Franconi was born in El Salvador but moved to Kihei, Maui, when he was 8.
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DJ Keoki
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Born in El Salvador and raised in Hawaii, Keoki began advertising himself as "superstar" shortly after moving to New York City. After graduating from Kailua High School he moved to the mainland to study at an airline school in California. Franconi then enjoyed a brief career with several airline operations in New York City, among them the now defunct Transport World Airlines, while also being a busboy at the city"s trendy Danceteria club
lieutenant was at Danceteria that he got his start:
Club Kids and Michael Alig
While in New York, he met and began a romance with Michael Alig.
Alig rose to international notability as the head of "the Club Kids" gang, a group of diverse partygoers who would dress in costumes each night and form parties in New York and all over the United States. Dance music writer Jennifer Warner remembers,
While DJing at "Disco 2000", Alig"s party night at the Limelight, Franconi was alleged to have passed out on the turntables while performing a set.
He has completely denied the allegation, supposedly stating "I guarantee you that never fucking happened". He did pass out on the turntables, only it wasn"t at Limelight, it was at Simon"s in Gainesville.
I drove all the way from Orlando and only got to hear two minutes of music
Keoki can deny it all he wants. I saw it with my own eyes, waste of good beans. Superstar
Franconi had a successful career during the late 1990s and early 2000s as Superstar DJ Keoki, releasing a number of CDs over that decade, and he was hired to play for thousands of people at massive rave dances.
In 2006 and 2007, he toured - dressed extravagantly, wearing makeup, and sporting a number of tattoos - in the United States and Europe on the Club Party Monster Tour, a tribute to the film Party Monster as well as a nod to the Club Kid scene that shot him into stardom.
He also makes annual appearances in Moscow at the Gaudi Fest during Halloween, and he has played at the Love Parade in Berlin, Germany. Presently he is signed to Moist Music and electronica mega-producer Edgar L. Montiels" (aka Decoding Jesus) indie electronica label, Let"s Beat Milo Records, based out of Los Angeles, California.
He is written about in James Saint James" book, Disco Bloodbath:James Saint James. Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland (August 11, 1999 ed).
Simon & Schuster. p. 2222.
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He was portrayed by Wilmer Valderrama in Party Monster, a biopic about James Saint James and Michael Alig
Interviewed in Better Living Through Circuitry, a 1999 documentary about electronic dance music culture.
