Words matter. These are the best Steve Aoki Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I always tell up-and-coming DJs you have to really love what you do and find that interest to drive you. It requires so much attention to detail, and it takes up a lot of your time. You hear a song, and there are so many little pieces that make that song work. It requires a lot of patience, diligence and resilience.
‘Neon Future’ is, in short, a positive outlook on human progress and technology, looking forward to a bright, colorful utopia. It’s embracing the future and looking toward the future in a more optimistic way.
A lot of my building blocks – who I am kind of as an artist – all came from being in L.A.
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 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.
I wasn’t sheltered or spoiled. All the money I made, I made myself.
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.
I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: ‘Pile Driver.’
Vegas is a very fickle market that’s about fun. It will change to what people want.
The haters and the trolls have always used me as an excuse to make fun of something that is out of the ordinary, something that doesn’t necessarily make sense to them. For whatever reason, I have always been a target that people love to attack.
Dance music is an emotional journey. It’s how well you can make people feel something that they haven’t felt.
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.
When I’m at a show, I’m there to have fun. Let’s just not care for a moment. So this cake in your face is to make you lose your mind. And it’s not about caring about whatever you are wearing and caring what other people are thinking about you. Out of the context, I’m trying to develop something else.
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.
High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you’re paid nothing; you’re playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.
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 favorite book is ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson.
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.
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?
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.
At my shows, I want to be totally sharp and focused on every single song, on every single thing that I do, and plus, I have to because I’m, like, caking someone and have to run back and mix the next song… and I have so much fast, quick reflex timing.
I love to work with artists that were able to find a brand new name and create something really exciting and fresh.
My first job was working at Benihana as kitchen help. In college, I was a telemarketer for a company at the same time I was a bike messenger for this greasy fast-food place.
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.
I love working with producers, like doing the record with Laidback Luke on ‘Turbulence’ and working with Afrojack on ‘No Beef.’
It’s a really diverse time in music, with all these different DJs and all these different categories, and we are all taking footnotes from everyone else. There are no real genre boundaries anymore; you can take a trance idea and put it into a trap record – it’s not that uncommon.
Being a musician since I was a teen, Guitar Center is the staple. You need anything to create, it’s there. You need a Guitar Center. You gotta give it homage. It’s a tool shed, and without the tool shed, it’s hard to create.
My favorite country to visit is Japan.
My favorite food is Ramen.
The craziest thing I’ve probably done during a show is the balcony dive – it was pretty scary. I was like, ‘This could result in an injury of mine,’ but somehow I survived.
For a producer, you want to be in L.A. You want to be close to the action, and in L.A. there are always singers, artists, songwriters, collaborators and other producers. It’s easy to get access to all that, which gives you more opportunity to work records.
The record labels used to spend money on advertising, and social media has replaced that entirely – it’s putting magazines out of business. It’s put big companies into completely reinventing their strategies.
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 feel pretty comfortable in front of a camera.
Self-discovery is so important in identity processing: who you hang out with, what clothes you wear, what shows you see. As a kid, I found out about things through friends. I would go to hardcore shows with 50 people.
