Steve Aoki has penned a lengthy article for The Daily Beast, defending his cake-throwing live show and claiming that he has “always been a target that people love to attack”.
Aoki, son of Benihanas founder Rocky Aoki, claims that he was first targeted for “not being American enough as an asian kid growing up in an all-white neighborhood”, then “not being indie enough for the die-hard hipsters in my 20s and now today, not being a “real DJ” for the electronic music purists”.
“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”, Aoki elaborates. “Taken out of context these ideas are honestly bizarre. 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.”
Aoki then focuses on an article from dance music parody site Wunderground, “Satire is a protected free speech (which I am a firm believer in) but this site walks a very fine line between satire and misleading the public”, he claims. “Of course there is FINE PRINT somewhere buried in the website stating that everything is fictional but that is difficult to find.”
Wunderground aren’t the only ones trying to sabotage Aoki’s career, however. Later in the article, he points to a video that purports to show him, Laidback Luke and Sander van Doorn pretending to DJ at Miami WMC, which he uses a jumping off point to explain everything from the basics of EQing to the history of his mid-show “rafting”, to the focal point of the article, the cake itself.
Throwing cake, claims Aoki, is a “tool of expression”. “This is my expression. This is my way … When I perform, I don’t think about the haters, the trolls on the Internet or anyone anywhere else in the world. All I care about is the [cake victim] in front of me, and I want to make that moment important … When I see the person who was begging for the cake then get covered in frosting as the crowd roars, smiling from ear to ear, it’s a unique and incredibly exciting feeling for myself, for them and for the crowd … The haters and Internet trolls don’t get it. There is no context because they don’t understand where I’m coming from.”
“When it comes down to it”, Aoki concludes, “I plan on caking people as long as people want it. My choice is to cake”. You can read the full post over at The Daily Beast.