Steve Aoki Quotes

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Steve Aoki

Profession : Musician

Birth : November 30, 1977

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.

Steve Aoki

When I work with artists, I give them a general guideline of what my vision is. Then they're going to speak their minds on how they view it, too. The song that defines 'Neon Future' the best is the title track. I wrote that with Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun. It's through his words. We had an amazing songwriting session together, connecting.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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?

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

My favorite country to visit is Japan.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

I started using a raft at my shows in 2009, and in 2011, I started caking people.

Steve Aoki

My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

Steve Aoki

'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.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

I love to work with artists that were able to find a brand new name and create something really exciting and fresh.

Steve Aoki

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.

Steve Aoki

'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.

Steve Aoki