Why music purists love to hate Steve Aoki and EDM

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/04/why-music-purists-love-to-hate-steve-aoki-and-edm

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Steve Aoki used to be underground. No, really.

Before he was a DJ taking to festival main stages, sending out shockwaves of high-energy, crunchy electro with a frothy head of trance through DayGlo-decorated, munted punters. Before he was doing over 200 shows a year, from Los Angeles to São Paulo. And long before he was making $23m a year (according to Forbes). Steve Aoki was in a band.

You know, a college band. The kind that would tour and play to 15 people in a back room. According to Aoki, 37, speaking at the Electronic Music Conference in Sydney, his band This Machine Kills was more hardcore than hard house. He was still making a racket, only with screaming, angry guitars rather than the womp-womp-womp, hands-in-the-air assault he inflicts on crowds today.

And it was out of his college dorm that he started a record label that would come to define the next two decades of his life: Dim Mak. In 1996 he was a one-man operation, pressing 600 vinyl he sold by hand. But a few successful releases – for Pretty Girls Make Graves, the Kills and Bloc Party, whose Banquet EP sold 80,000 physical copies – and suddenly everyone wanted a seat on the Dim Mak train.

“It went from me being in my apartment to hiring my first employee and then getting, like, 13 interns over the summer,” Aoki recalls. “I didn’t know what to do with certain people so I’m like, ‘Are you going to start cooking? Because people need to eat. There’s this bagel shop, where they throw away day-old bagels, you get those bagels.’ It was very much a Fight Club operation, it felt very ghetto-fucking-cool.”

We created this really cool, small, unique hipster scene where it wasn't about the DJing because these DJs couldn't DJ

As his label surfed the crest of that garage/punk rock revival wave, Aoki began inviting these same indie bands to DJ at Dim Mak parties in Hollywood. “We created this really cool, small, unique hipster scene where it wasn’t about the DJing because these DJs couldn’t DJ, and I couldn’t DJ back then.” But it anticipated another growing trend circa 2004: the burgeoning marriage of indie and electro music, which had its home in labels such as Ed Banger (Paris), clubs such as Trash (London) and in Sydney with the Bang Gang DJs.

Everyone was suddenly mad for electro remixes of indie rock songs and Aoki was perfectly placed to (learn how to) make and release them. After his Sydney speech, Aoki tells me that this era was “definitely the punk side of dance music, because it was too noisy for the commercial space. A lot of the commercial DJs didn’t like the Bloody Beetroots or Justice, or anything like them.”

In the years that followed, this noisy electro-indie amalgamation took on another complexion as Aoki started to collaborate with acts including Tiësto – something many of Aoki’s fans weren’t too happy about. Back in those heady hipster days, Tiësto sat squarely in more populist – for certain tribes, decidedly uncool – genre of trance. And so Aoki found himself in (or was drawn to, does it matter which?) this thing called EDM.

EDM is hard to define precisely and few DJs ever wave its flag. The acronym stands for electronic dance music, but it’s a misnomer because EDM has come to mean a specific dance music subgenre, distinct from other sounds such as techno, minimal house, disco, funk, drum’n’bass. It captures a period of dance music history in which rave culture finally broke through to the American mainstream, after decades of dominance in Europe, Australia and a few local strongholds including California and Detroit.

Aoki describes EDM as “electro-house trance” and implies it was festival promoters booking him for festival main stages that led to the evolution of his bigger, more euphoric sounds. “I don’t want to limit my expression or limit my growth. So if people want to put me on the main stage, I’m going to do my thing on the main stage. And after doing that consistently, all of a sudden people are like, ‘You’re EDM.’ So now it’s like a love-hate thing.”

Such was Aoki’s road to EDM, but different DJs have brought different things to the genre: Skrillex, who like Aoki was formerly in a hardcore band, before morphing into a dubstep DJ; Avicii’s uplifting house with pop twist; French electro from David Guetta. What these acts share, other than making obscene amounts of money, is an ability to pack out 20,000-capacity festival stadiums (the kind that a decade ago was strictly reserved for top-billing rock acts). And bass drops.

Music purists love to hate EDM. They sledge these DJs for their unwillingness to play outside a predictable setlist of blockbuster dance tracks, their reliance on technology such as auto-sync (the “push-button” approach) and cheap-trick DJ moves. Indicative of both the fever-pitch fans and the backlash is a Saturday Night Live short featuring Andy Samberg as DJ Davvincii, whose one job involves pressing a giant “bass” button. In the mean time he kills time behind the decks: frying an egg, drawing a self-portrait and accepting bags of money. The crowd goes wild.

The hate flung at Aoki targets his apparently privileged upbringing (he is the son of former Japanese wrestler and restauranteur Rocky; his half-sister is former model Devon) and his propensity for on-stage antics (throwing cake at the audience; crowdsurfing on inflatable rafts). Aoki addressed these in an editorial for the Daily Beast, writing: “Cake and rafts are like nutritional supplements. The real meal is the music.”

I suspect the haters also sit outside that sweet-spot 18- to 25-year-old demographic, who listen to EDM with “special headphones” (drugs), transforming its scuzzy tanker of sound into a full-blown, body-floating transcendental experience. Aoki tells me he writes with the stadium in mind. “I’m thinking, ‘How is this just going to make people go lose their mind?’ ”

And he differentiates these club tracks from his album work, in which he collaborates with artists including Linkin Park in what he calls “proper songwriting”. His second studio album, Neon Future vol 1, kicks off with a track featuring futurist Ray Kurzweil in conversation, a challenge Aoki relished. “Writing those weird soundscapes underneath it was so fucking fun. Seriously, I felt like I was floating.” He could write a whole album of them, he says, though “maybe under a different alias”.

It isn’t the first time Aoki has mentioned writing under a pseduonym. In November he offhandedly told Mixmag his plans to release some deep house tracks he’d been writing under a different moniker. In part so he doesn’t dilute the Aoki brand but perhaps as well because the Aoki brand can be a heavy cross to bear. When I ask Aoki if he’s already carried through with those plans he initially denies everything: “No, no,” then jokes: “Maybe … who knows?”

Aoki is less master craftsman, more musical seer, one step ahead of the next breaking thing. He is acutely aware that in the fickle world of commercial music, it’s all too easy to drop off the radar and he is working desperately hard to ensure that he is never dumped on the pile marked irrelevant.

“It’s so easy to fall back and be gluttonous, eat off your wealth and then you come back to the fold and it’s too late, no one is interested anymore,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen, when friends of mine had their moment to shine after they’ve prepped themselves to that, and then they just don’t deliver because they’re too lazy or too distracted or something.”

So, despite the hefty paychecks (he refuses to confirm the $23m-a-year figure), Aoki continues his gruelling work schedule – he’ll end the year having completed 240 shows – with the remaining time spent in his studio.

“I had two days off this year and I went to see two movies. You don’t understand how good it felt to sit in a movie theatre. I was like holy shit, I’m not in a fucking studio right now, I’m not DJing. It’s very rare.”