Steve Aoki, the Los Angeles DJ who regularly commands crowds of tens of thousands of people at electronic-dance-music festivals, is analyzing the complex metrics of his career. “I’ve thrown over 4,000 cakes in people’s faces. It’s incredible,” he says. “If I do about 10 cakes a show, and 250 to 300 shows a year, 4,000 is actually a conservative number.”
Aoki, 37, has been making dance music since 2007, but it wasn’t until two years later that his distinctive brand of showmanship kicked in. He began by venturing from his onstage DJ booth to dive into the crowd, then expanded to bringing on women in neon cloaks and surfing the crowd in inflatable swim rafts. Later, after an artist called Autoerotique blew up cakes in a video, Aoki decided to smush fans’ faces with cakes of all kinds — to the point that fans attend his shows today bearing “please cake me” and “I need the cake” signs.
“Cake is messy, but it’s soft and sugary, and it’s explosive. It gets all over you, and it’s incredibly voyeuristic,” Aoki says, in a 20-minute phone interview from Manchester, England. “You want to be part of it without actually getting any cake on you.”
So what kind of cake does Aoki prefer? “I don’t eat cake,” he says. “I’m actually on a no-carb diet right now.”
Although Aoki is one of the world’s most popular DJs, having remixed songs by stars from Drake to the late Michael Jackson and commanding millions of dollars from touring, Las Vegas nightclub residencies and huge festivals such as the Electric Daisy Carnival, he began his music career as a hardcore punk rocker. His father is the late Rocky Aoki, who founded the Benihana restaurant chain and became a flashy celebrity inspired by Donald Trump, but Rocky saw to it that Steve and his half-sister, Devon, did not indulge in his $100 million fortune while he was alive.
At 14, Aoki joined a community of Southern California hardcore bands. Internalizing hardcore’s DIY philosophy, he formed an independent record label, Dim Mak, and joined a band, This Machine Kills. “At the hardcore shows I did, (given) the culture I was part of, you talked about the songs (for a longer time) than the actual length of the songs. You could talk for five minutes about what the song was about, and then you’d play the song, and the song was 45 seconds long,” he recalls. “It’s more like a club — go and hang out.”
In the early 2000s, Aoki moved to LA and became inspired by electronic-dance acts such as Justice and MSTRKRFT. He transformed into a DJ, spinning hardcore and electronic records at bars and parties, figuring out how to use Pro Tools to remix other people’s songs. Soon he was putting out his own albums, like 2007’s debut “Pillowface & His Airplane Chronicles,” with reinterpreted tracks by Peaches, Bloc Party and others.
Aoki’s musical strength is in adding funky electronic noises to other artists’ work, as he did with Drake’s “Forever” and his “Tornado” collaboration with Tiesto. His latest album, last year’s “Neon Future Vol. 1,” begins on a swirling, ethereal note (the title track is with Australian singer-songwriter Luke Steele), then surges into dance-party playfulness (in “Rage the Night Away,” Aoki’s melodic buzzing acts as a foil for Waka Flocka Flame’s booming raps). And he has recently collaborated with scientists such as Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey for a series of online interview videos.
But the distinctively long-haired, bearded Aoki is mainly known for his live shows. In 2007, he was one of the first EDM artists to play West Coast rock festival Coachella. “It’s a hot day, and everyone’s sitting down watching the show. And my set is different — I was playing electro, and electro was noisy and rambunctious,” he says. “It was what I call the punk uprising of dance music. I was waving that flag as loud and proud as possible.
“It was nerve-wracking. It was scary,” he continues. “On a song I was playing, there was so much dust on the (record-player) needle, ’cause we were in the desert, that it started clogging up the music and having this feedback, like, ‘CRWRWR.’ … Things like that happen all the time in clubs, but at a festival, it means everything.”
Coachella paid him $4,000 to return in 2009, and this time he showed up with his newfound props. “Especially at the beginning, you’re making a first impression. Why would someone take a risk on spending time at your set versus five other stages?” he asks. “You know there’s a contingent that won’t leave because they’re stuck in the front, but the rest of the people have a huge question mark over their heads, like, ‘Why should I stay?’
“It was all these $5 gags — buying a raft and throwing it in the crowd and jumping in it, buying some Super Soakers,” he says. “All this s— was like, ‘Let’s do a really fun, creative show’ And it worked, man. It f—— worked.”
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When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Aragon, 1106 W. Lawrence Ave.
Tickets: $35; 773-561-9500 or livenation.com
