Starting out touring dive venues in the back of a van, and ending up headlining the main stages of EDM festivals, Dim Mak label owner and DJ Steve Aoki is the accidental superstar who may well have paved the way for those following in his footsteps... Words:DREW MILLARDPics: DOVE SHORE
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t’s a question that boggles even the finest of thinkers, one that inspires novels and plays and movies and macramé and hours- long debates between stoned college freshmen, one so deceptively simple that the answer could only be ineffable: What does it mean to truly be American?
In the context of dance music, try Steve Aoki’s story on for size. Here, you have a 34-year-old DJ, label owner and club proprietor from Los Angeles who never intended to so much as touch a mixer. “I’ve never been formally trained in anything, even music and production,” the husky-voiced Los Angelino tells DJ Mag USA while on the phone from Zurich, preparing for yet another night on the town. “Everything I’ve done is a process of self-discovery.”
He started out his musical life in the hardcore punk scene, a young teen just trying to find a culture to fit into. Aoki practiced a straight-edge lifestyle, eschewing drinking and drugs in favor of clean living (he kept this up until he was 22), and bouncing from punk outfit to punk outfit, living on the road. “We would be in a van for a month straight, getting $50 a show and putting all of it towards gas, either finding some guy’s basement to sleep in, or sleeping in the van with all our stinky clothes.” Sleeping next to dirty laundry or not, Aoki found that he was pretty good at what he did. He stuck with it. Suddenly, he was touring with bands, running a record label and publishing a scene- documenting ‘zine on the side. He realized he had a pretty good thing going for him. So what was he supposed to do after that? Well, Aoki threw a party. It seemed to go well. So then he threw another party, then another, and yet another after that, until suddenly Aoki and his Dim Mak label — in those years home to notable rock acts such as Bloc Party, The Kills, Gossip and Battles — were quickly garnering a reputation as purveyors of the finest parties in the city.
REMIX From there, Aoki took to the decks. “I was the host and promoter of these parties, so I became a DJ. That’s really what segued me into electronic music,” he says. Working with Blake Miller of the band Moving Units, Aoki started remixing the bands on his label. He and Miller took Bloc Party’s ‘Helicopter’ and stripped it of its frenetic drive, replacing it with an icy sheen
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of gurgly synths, aesthetically reminiscent of the post-Soviet region from which the band derived its name. It’s a testament to Aoki’s vision that he saw the potential of Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke as an ace house vocalist — Okereke would eventually release two solo electronic albums, ‘The Boxer’ and ‘The Hunter’, and went so far as to lend his voice to a remix of Martin Solveig’s ‘Ready Set Go’ last year. Another key early remix, The Rakes’ ‘Work Work Work’, took the band’s post-Libertines slop-rock and knocked the British drunks back a couple decades into the realm of proper post-punk, the rowdy track taking on a New Order-esque gravitas once singer Alan Donohoe was placed over a beat in mechanized lockstep. Coaxing emotion out of a remix is no easy task, especially for a man who again had no formal musical training. Here’s where the hardcore comes back in. “The hardcore community is based on DIY values — it’s basically the flesh and bones of what I’ve done as an artist,” reflects Steve. This Do-It- Yourself mentality is something as American as high school football — The Great Gatsby used the opportunities that America is rife with to turn himself from a for-real poor person into a fake rich person; Mark Zuckerberg created a technological empire out of a bit of coding know-how and a set of severe social problems; and Steve Aoki went from a dude who had no idea how the fuck Serato worked to one of the top DJs on the terrestrial earth, who’s been called upon to remix the likes of Kanye West, Drake and Lady Gaga, and who regularly DJs to crowds of thousands of screaming fans. This is the American Dream, encapsulated. You start out in a van, and end up a superstar.
ACCIDENTAL SUPERSTAR The trope of the ‘Accidental Superstar DJ’ is, in its own weird way, something shared by a lot of Aoki’s fellow notable Americans: Skrillex, he of the half-shaved head and filling-loosening bass drops, cut his teeth as the singer of the screamtastic Warped Tour staple From First To Last, and probably would have been a scene kid for the rest of his life until he had a life-changing experience at a Daft Punk concert. Long before he was being named the No.1 DJ in America, Kaskade was a Mormon missionary in Japan, which is about as far away from being a famous DJ as you can get without being dead. Hell, even Diplo, the Mad Decent label boss and noted musical magpie, probably never expected he’d be where he’s at now — he was a crusty Florida kid who mashed
up records with DJ Low Budget, and with his then-sweetheart, M.I.A., was going to take down capitalism with their ‘Piracy Funds Terrorism’ mixes. He set out to destroy the system, not become a part of it.
There’s a reason for this trend of American DJs falling backwards into mainstream dance music, something tied to this nation’s cultural history. Unlike, say, the UK, which went through the Summer of Love in 1988, helping the nation’s musical consciousness take a sharp left-turn into the rave scene, club culture was never normalized in the USA. The presence of a fully-fledged dance scene in Europe had an incubatory effect, conditioning mainstream audiences to experience music in two distinct ways — both as individuals and as a collective. If you’re at a club in Berlin, checking out a set by Luciano, you tend to notice how much you’re not supposed to notice the DJ at all. He isn’t the direct source of the crowd’s entertainment, but instead he’s the person who curates their experience. This is completely normal in Europe, and there are scores of DJs who thrive off of being very good at deflecting attention.
MAINSTREAM Meanwhile, whenever dance music has vacated the fringes of American pop music and entered into the true mainstream, it does so through the blunt, thoughtless force more typical of an arms race. Fatboy Slim might have been famous in the UK ever since the No.1 Clash-sampling ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ under the Beats International name, but it took him hiring Christopher Walken to dance around in his music videos for people to notice him in America. Daft Punk scored hit after hit Stateside by pretending to be robots who hung out in a lit-up pyramid. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem might have singlehandedly invented “dance-punk,” but even though he called a generation out on selling their guitars and buying turntables, he was the rare rock star smart enough to own both already. It’s a tension of energies and economies, a question of whether it’s better to project energy or simply channel it,
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