whether the interests of the individual should triumph against the greater good. In other words, there’s a philosophical reason people look straight ahead during some dance shows, but not during others. Reconciling this is tricky as fuck. The secret of the new wave of American DJs, however, is this: dance music is just that — music. You don’t have to reconcile shit. The advent of mega-clubs and gargantuan dance festivals the world over in many ways reframed the role of the DJ — if someone is paying as much money to watch you play songs as they might spend on a new lawnmower, you owe it to them to transcend the role of shadowy selector, foregrounding yourself as something of a “noteworthy mediator” for the crowd. Lots of American DJs inhabit this mentality, but on crack. When Skrillex hits the decks, he takes care to direct his audience using his body language, chain-smoking, twiddling knobs like crazy in front of a gigantic projection screen that features a video of a man’s head and the earth simultaneously exploding, superimposed upon one other. He’s moving around so much that you’re worried that his cigarette might light his hair on fire. The audience is still dancing, but there’s no question as to whom the center of attention is.
FANS
The band KISS very famously espoused the philosophy that if a person was purchasing a ticket to their concert, that person temporarily became the band’s employer. So, the band had both a moral and capitalist obligation to put on the best show humanly possible. With his live show, Aoki aims for something similar. “If you’re going to a show,” he says of the typical teenager that makes up his teeming audience, “it’s a big deal. It’s a long ordeal for one particular person to come to a show. And if you think about not just one person but a thousand people, that means a lot to me.” So, Aoki gives everything he’s got to the fans. Aoki’s live gigs showcase the kind of joyous and dirty pomp that seems so fun that people should only be allowed to make movies about it. He’ll abandon the DJ booth for stretches at a time, ignoring his DJing duties in favor of spraying the audience with champagne, whipping cakes into the faces of audience members, or crowd-surfing whilst buoyed in an inflatable life boat. However, Aoki recently came into controversy because of a leaked tour rider obtained by the blog HarderBloggerFaster, who suggested that while it might be true that he gives everything he has to his fans, Aoki might also be demanding his hosts give everything they have to him, including a king’s ransom of socks, underwear, v-neck t-shirts, a director’s chair, two bottles of Cristal, and said inflatable lifeboat. HBF mocked him, deeming his demands excessive at best, and downright spoiled at worst. Aoki took to his blog to justify himself, explaining that the socks and underwear were split between him and his crew, and that they requested that stuff be given to them at the venue because it allowed them to travel lightly, and therefore efficiently. The director’s chair he claimed to know nothing about and summarily deleted it from his rider. As for the Cristal, he claimed on his website, “It’s definitely a ballin’ move. Do I need it? No, but if I can get it… sweet!” Who are we to disagree?
EDM If there’s one thing to learn from what guys like Skrillex and Aoki are doing (other than to not, under any circumstances, ask for Cristal on one’s
014
rider), it’s that in the landscape of modern pop music, the term “rock star” isn’t just reserved for dudes who play actual rock music — it’s for everyone. Turn the dial on your radio to your local pop station. The overwhelming majority of what you’ll hear is beamed in straight from the EDM world. You’ve got Lady Gaga, whose schizophrenic pan-genre global pop can oscillate from blissed- out Balearic cuts to the Americana of Bruce Springsteen within the span of a single song. ‘Wild Ones’, Flo Rida’s most recent album, finds the Miami pop-hopper rapping over recent EDM hits more or less wholesale. Then there’s Diplo, one of the staunch weirdos of the American dance scene, who’s recently found himself in the curious position of producing for the likes of Chris Brown, Beyonce and Justin Bieber. And just as everyone assumed it was high time for Miami’s Pitbull to finally be put down, he more or less singlehandedly resuscitated hip-house, a genre hybrid long assumed to have gone the way of the Dodo and the Charlotte Hornets, through sheer force of greaseball personality. The examples are myriad, and there’s no reason to think they’ll be stopping any time soon. And in Los Angeles, tucked away in his club Dim Mak Studios, Aoki quietly helped kickstart the entire damn thing, playing the role of cultural ambassador, using the space to introduce parties on both sides of the EDM divide. “We introduced Lady Gaga and Ke$ha to Justice and Daft Punk. We were the first to bring out Afrojack and Chuckie. We did parties with Fool’s Gold, and had Kid Cudi for the first time in L.A. There’s so much history in that room,” he recalls, without acknowledging this rapid crossover as a direct result of anything he consciously did. “I didn’t really think about it in such a macro scale. Back in the day, I was just like, ‘Man, it’d be great if there were more people in the club.’”
Aoki’s unassuming big-tent mentality deeply informs ‘Wonderland’, which 10 years into his DJ career comes as his first proper solo album, in many ways the philosophical apotheosis of his career. ‘Wonderland’ presents in its own way a more mature Aoki, less concerned with giving his audience a quick-burning sugar rush and instead focusing on the idea of the album as gestalt. “It’s less about writing bangers,” he says of the album. “I wanted to make it diverse.” Indeed, ‘Wonderland’ displays a more varied, demure Aoki than his remix work or DJ sets might suggest. Drawing sonically from what’s caught Aoki’s ear in the past year or two, ‘Wonderland’ is a curious beast. On opener ‘Earthquakey People’, Aoki and guest Rivers Cuomo run through the type of zig-zagging electro that Aoki built his reputation upon. The Wynter Gordon-featuring ‘Ladi Dadi’, meanwhile, starts as lithe progressive house before quickly devolving into a full-fledged dubstep tune, the bass drops slowly accelerating and subsequently being chopped into percussion stabs until they’ve been properly Aokified. The album progresses as albums such as these tend to, Aoki tackling a distinct style of dance and pumping it so full of party that it could have only come from him. Consider ‘Emergency’, a Lil Jon and Chiddy Bang-featuring slab of Miami Bass that’s so dumb it’s nearly unassailable, or ‘Livin My Love’, a hectic electro cut where LMFAO chastise you for even so much as daring to fuck with their buzz.
ALBUM Perhaps it was Aoki’s intention to frontload ‘Wonderland’ with songs that sound exactly
like the type of songs that one would expect to appear on a Steve Aoki album. By structuring ‘Wonderland’ as such, Aoki gave himself the opportunity to saw his own legs out from under himself. What’s even more impressive is that he manages to make himself look like a genius in the process. Part Two of ‘Wonderland’ is anchored by the stellar, nigh-unprecedented ‘Control Freak’, which finds Baltimore’s Blaqstarr and neo-pop chanteuse My Name Is Kay engaging in a lovers rock over a lush bed of funky house. “It’s not typical of what I usually produce,” Aoki admits. “But I’m obsessed with that type of song.”
Coming off of half an album’s worth of electro that’s unilaterally widescreen in its sonic presentation, the airy, near-organic bass stabs in ‘Control Freak’ carry double the weight. Aoki returns to the nu-disco well with ‘Heartbreaker’, a pulsating cut that in parts throbs so much you can nearly feel it ooze. ‘Ooh’, meanwhile, makes headway into the assertion that some American strains of dubstep are trying to accomplish the same thing that Southern Trap Music is, leaving goofball Floridian MC Rob Roy more or less to his own devices as he tries to duck and weave through the mid-sized avalanche of bass stabs Aoki throws his way.
There’s one more surprise on ‘Wonderland’. It’s ‘The Kids Will Have Their Say’, which at first blush seems to be simply a throwback to the heyday of electroclash, featuring a couple of random punk dudes. However, amongst those who offer the song more than a cursory reading, the song endures as the most polarizing cut of Aoki’s career. Aoki takes vocal duties, screaming with relish as he momentarily revisits his days helming hardcore outfits. Performing alongside members of legendary hardcore bands Die Kruzen and The Exploited, it’s easy to imagine this arrangement as the wildest dreams of a 19-year-old straight- edge Steve Aoki come to fruition. However, given the course Aoki’s life eventually took away from punk, the song takes on an added weight. ‘The Kids Will Have Their Say’ shares a title with a 1982 song by Boston straight-edge band SSD, then known as SS Decontrol. In the SSD song, vocalist David Spring asserts that life is terrible, society punishes people for being alive and the only meaningful thing you can do about it is die, because at least your death is yours and yours alone. Aoki’s ‘The Kids Will Have Their Say’, meanwhile, looks at the same essential quandary — how to assert one’s own individuality given the malaise and general terribleness of society — with a more mature, measured eye. “Reinvention is the name of the game/You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” Aoki screams, continuing with, “Generations keep evolving with change/Systems come and go and it’s time to rearrange.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100