Steve Aoki Quotes

Dance music is my love, is my passion, is my life. I live for my fans and take my art very seriously.

I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: ‘Pile Driver.’

My favorite food is Ramen.

On my YouTube channel, I put up 3-4 videos a week, and I spend a lot of money to maintain that content. When I travel, I travel with a videographer and a photographer no matter what.

My life, I swear, is, like, 75% public. I have a very small percentage of my life that is private. But I do keep that private life private.

No matter what I do, I can’t help but feel that I’m under a microscope. Some of it is completely silly, and some of it is meant to be hurtful. For example, a website accumulated all of my music videos to point out perceived Illuminati images. I loved that one. Of course, it was all ridiculous but funny.

There’s a big gaping hole in the EDM space for songwriting. It’s one thing to learn how to be a great sound designer and become big just on sound design. Especially if you’re in the dubstep category, it’s like, how much fatter and more interesting can you make those drops.

Whenever I work with different artists, I expand as a song writer, as a producer, and I always want to try and find the bridge between my world and their world.

I never cake someone who doesn’t want to be caked – at least, I try not to. Sometimes I miss my target. I’m pretty much going through the crowd making sure I find someone who wants to get caked. If you don’t want to get caked, shake your head or tell me you don’t want to get caked. It’s that easy.

For a DJ at my level, you can really go through life and travel the world without seeing a single thing. It’s harder to go out and see the sights than it is to play a show.

It’s of course important to mention that when DJing, I’m building my own story through the music. I’m figuring out what song to play next, what song to play after that, and how the two will blend together. How the emotion is going to develop from one song to another. So I first build that storyline.

I have been doing merch’ since I was 15 and in bands when I was a teenager – silk-screening shirts, making the emulsion in my mom’s closet I converted into a dark room, through college. That’s essentially how us bands survived was selling homemade t-shirts.

The way I pick who gets caked is generally by who shows me the most energy and is screaming for it. I still can’t help but ask myself… should I stop caking people? Will that stop the haters from hating? Stop giving the trolls more content to target me with?

I like looking at a future where we’re expanding our creativity and brightening our lives. I believe that eventually we’ll get to a point where we’ll be able to live indefinitely through our technology.

The thought of bringing a cake into a dance music show is a bizarre one. The idea of rafting on top of people is just as bizarre as well. And I think whenever something bizarre comes into play, it immediately becomes an easy target. And for those reasons, I know that I have been the target of criticism.

Extending our lives, extending our creativity, opening up the mysteries of the brain. All those things that are really exciting – that’s kind of the basis of ‘Neon Future,’ and that’s why I interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey.

I’m 36, but I still feel like a punk kid with $200 in my savings account.

I love working with producers, like doing the record with Laidback Luke on ‘Turbulence’ and working with Afrojack on ‘No Beef.’

I’ve been doing my record label for 15 years called Dim Mak. I started my label when I was 19 in ’96. I started putting out an eclectic roster of artists. In 2003, we found a band called Bloc Party, and in 2004, we started getting remixes for Bloc Party, and at the same time I was throwing Dim Mak parties in Los Angeles.

My favorite country to visit is Japan.

A lot of my building blocks – who I am kind of as an artist – all came from being in L.A.

Dance music is an emotional journey. It’s how well you can make people feel something that they haven’t felt.

For me, I guess the general reason for using social media is that the connection I have with people who are interested in my music is extremely important to me. That connection is like the pillar in everything I do. I want to embrace that connection and make it stronger.

Artists are creating their own genre sound, and other artists are building upon that sound and already creating a huge subculture created around one particular sound created by one artist. So, with all that happening, the genres are going to break down, and there’s going to be a multitude of sound coming out.

I feel pretty comfortable in front of a camera.