After taking a nearly ten-minute break to introduce his family and friends to the assembled crowd at Manhattan’s mammoth Beacon Theater, and trying to take the perfect crowd selfie in order to “remember this night for the rest of [his] life,” Steve Aoki resumes his position behind his turntables. The Los Angeles-based DJ is at last ready to enter the final stretch of a 90-minute set following the premiere of his new documentary at Tribeca Film Fest. The lights dim again, and the treacle-sweet flute from—what else?—Celine Dion’s eternal anthem “My Heart Will Go On,” begins to creep out of the speakers up above.
Aoki begins purposefully mashing on buttons, and the ballad begins to warp and phase in a seasick manner familiar to those who spend a lot of spelunking in the bowels of YouTube’s EDM remixes. And then, as you know, the bass drops, with the kind of aural wallop that hits you somewhere deep inside your chest—not so much tugging on your heartstrings as severing them entirely. All the while, the video backdrop behind the turntables rolls the iconic “I’m flying” scene from Titanic, edited to superimpose Aoki’s face on both DiCaprio and Winslet. This is the surreal, overwhelming—and somehow, strangely endearing—world of Steve Aoki, to which I’m just a humble tourist.
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I arrived at the theater several hours earlier in order to attend the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, a new documentary focused on Aoki directed by the relatively unknown filmmaker Justin Krook and produced by David Gelb (the director of the acclaimed Jiro Dreams of Sushi). But I’m a film critic, not a seasoned raver, so the night was to serve as an immersive introduction to Aoki for someone whose electronic music knowledge is limited almost exclusively to acts that employ novelty headgear (and strange television subplots). Based on the way the crowd greeted him, I never would’ve guessed that he’s almost universally disliked—at least, by dance music purists.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead film still/courtesy of the artist
Taking after some of history’s masters of pomp and circumstance, the film opens with a montage set to the dramatic strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Krook renders Aoki’s onstage antics in poetic, dreamy slow-motion. He rides rafts over crowds, douses himself and the front rows with uncontrollable streams of bubbly, and, in a tradition never really fully explained in the doc (and therefore entirely lost on me), throws numerous sheet cakes at the audience.
Following this explosive introduction, the film makes quick business of establishing Aoki—whose most famous depictions are literally one-dimensional—as a surprisingly multi-faceted subject. Steve spent his childhood as an outcast of sorts on the west coast, the son of the late, absentee restaurant magnate, Rocky Aoki, founder of Japanese restaurant chain-cum-fire-hazard Benihana. This is fairly common knowledge, but the film reveals that that Rocky was rarely around, and provided no financial aid to his son’s musical endeavours—which began when Steve established Dim Mak Records in 1996 out of his tiny apartment, releasing early records by Bloc Party and post-hardcore thrashers Blood Brothers before becoming a foundational part of the EDM quasi-movement. Steve then parlayed that success into ascending the ranks of the electronic music world as a DJ. The film juxtaposes this younger wide-eyed version of Steve with the present day’s—where he’s one of the most financially successful electronic artists in the world, travelling extensively, playing upwards of 300 shows a year, and regularly headlining huge festivals like Tomorrowland—which appears to just be like a bad Disneyland with more uppers, but maybe the film didn’t really do it justice.
The doc occasionally flirts with hagiography, like many films with living subjects do. But aside from a myopic focus on the heroic hard work of his touring and recording sessions, Sleep is most successful when dealing with the impacts of Steve’s late father, Rocky Aoki, a fascinating figure in his own right, whom most everybody onscreen—Steve included—attributes the producer’s inhuman drive to.
It’s not hard to see why: Rocky was a larger-than-life individual, both an accomplished businessman and daredevil (he held a world record for longest hot air balloon ride), who once said in a televised interview that family was only his third priority in life. Obviously, he’d never have much time or tolerance for his Women’s Studies-majoring, punk rock-loving son, causing the younger Aoki to work even harder to try to live up to his name and get his dad’s attention. “It was always, ‘How do impress my father?’” Steve bluntly reveals at one point.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist of contradictions, as it becomes clear that Aoki wants to have his cake and throw it too. He’s a man desperate for the approval of his father, while working in a field he knows Rocky didn’t particularly respect. He also wants to lay claim to punk rock credibility (having come up in California’s DIY scene), and enjoy the opportunities his status as an incredibly popular, mainstream DJ allots him. There’s a segment near the end of the film where Aoki asserts his 2015 LAoki concert—a free, 7,000 cap show in the streets of Downtown LA, approved by his close pal, the mayor of the city—is punk in some way. By all metrics, it wasn’t, but it did make a lot of people happy. That’s how things seem to go for him.
Later, in a clip devoted to his Internet haters (a lot of people really don’t like him, it seems), the doc calls upon Aoki’s friend will.i.am to give them the ol’ what-for. He asserts that if the record store-working “haters had their way, Black Eyed Peas would have stopped with ‘Joints & Jam,’” denying us all the other, uh, gems they’ve released in that song’s wake. All the vitriol in the world can’t stop him or Aoki from creating work that huge numbers of people genuinely connect with and enjoy, and there is something admirable in that—even if you still can’t wrap your head around “Let’s Get Retarded.”
Sleep smartly saves its best moment for the end—a striking montage where Krook cuts between Steve’s LAoki set, the Aoki family enjoying a meal at Benihana, and clips from Rocky’s daredevil career. Flashing lights and roaring crowds are juxtaposed with flaming mountains of onions and high-octane speedboat racing—visually confirming that both father and son seem more concerned with putting on an entertaining show than necessarily producing something challenging or innovative. They’re in the business of (either literally or figuratively) comfort food—stuff not really substantive, but a nice, sweet treat if you allow yourself to live a little and indulge. The best parties take place in the penthouse of the food pyramid anyway.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead film still/courtesy of the artist
All my assumptions were confirmed once Steve took to the Beacon’s ornate stage for his post-screening DJ set. From what I gleaned, Aoki bounces between two modes during his sets: half of it is comprised of, for better or worse, exactly what the popular perception of EDM is, with all the squelchy, screechy, treble-y synths one could ask for, and booming bass dropping at the exact right time to spur the maximum amount of movement from Pavlov’s ravers. In the other half, Aoki makes Top 40 hits get biz-zay (consistently and thoroughly), by giving them a light coat of dance cliches—this went bad during a particularly flaccid remix of Adele’s “Hello”—or at least I thought it did. The motley crowd of Aoki fans and film nerds sung along to every word.
Still, there’s no denying the man’s showmanship—dancing, singing, hopping on his turntables with gusto, now de rigeur for all EDM stars—and he’s able to work a crowd like nobody’s business. He’s also got his hyperactive visuals on lock; highlights included a gaudy, gold, art-deco “Aoki” that looked like an ad for Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, as well as a questionably tasteful graphic that rendered a pack of animated Aokis into a mariachi band (accompanying a vaguely Latin-sounding beat, natch). No cakes were thrown, to my disappointment, though I suspect that the Beacon’s fancy carpeting had something to do with that decision.
Throughout the evening, Aoki is eager to please, prefacing songs energetically by letting you know he’s about to drop some “brand new shit,” that he hopes you’ll like, and spends time ensuring the crowd gets in his Snapchat story. It’s clear he wants to be your friend, and wants to make sure you have a good time—and he accomplishes this almost by sheer force of will.
It’s just kind of hard to hate a man who brings his mom onstage to kiss her feet in front of hundreds of onlookers, and has the chutzpah to, with nary a trace of irony, close his set with a fittingly titled twofer of Coldplay’s “Fix You” and Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness.” Maybe I’m weak—but I’m more inclined to believe that if you leave yourself open to what Aoki has on offer—specifically, energetic party music, best consumed live and at high decibels—you might be able to let go of your inhibitions and have some fun for a while. And based on I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, that’s all he really seems to want anyway.
