Steve Aoki Quotes

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

In the future I think the labels on most pop music are going to go. Everyone keeps jumping into everyone else's space.

There's many different genres, and when you see R&B and pop and house, as well as electronic, come together, that's the reality of what music is.

What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music.

Hip-hop educated me about other forms of music, because it sampled from all different styles.

Hip-hop is a part of rock & roll because it comes from DJ culture. DJ culture is the embodiment of all genres and all recorded music, if you actually pay attention to it.

People don't listen to one radio station. On iTunes you can mix different worlds and bring country and pop and folk and live music together with a mass audience. I could have sung 'Easy' in a country way but I just sang it how I sing. I think it's a really nice blend.

I love all types of music, and I think the genre lines are starting to get thinner every year.

I came from a strong jazz/ singer-songwriter/folk influence, but in L.A., I learned how to have a balance between all these genres and R&B music and hip-hop, mixing them all together.

I don't want to be classified as an old-skool DJ or new-skool DJ. I want to be classified as an all-skool DJ who plays it all. I also want to learn to DJ house music in my own fashion.

I don't care if it's rap, metal, whatever. You still should play Beatles records mixed with Limp Bizkit mixed with Foghat mixed with Creedence Clearwater Revival, stuff like that.

When I started working on electronic music, that was after the rave period. I haven't even seen that part of it that much.

I just cut songs I love and that represent what I want to say. And if it crosses over, that's very flattering. It's cool to know that with people listening to rock and rap, I'm sitting on their iPods along with that stuff.

Puffy's contribution to hip-hop culture was the remix. He offered us the music that his mom played in front of him, with newer drums and younger artists. That worked, and will consistently be there. The remix comes right after the original record, that's something Puffy did to influence the culture.

I'm a real genre jumper, but all good music belongs to the same family. I love Dave Sitek, a producer I've been working with a lot since I moved to L.A. He will change the game.

The Beatles and Ray Charles were in the same charts together, and that was just called pop music - it wasn't called soul or rock. The best pop music just stands out as something that's just original, and I think it should all be called pop again.

Rap is always evolving. It's easy for the old school to hate the new school, but it's a music that got a little stifled I think, by the Internet a little bit.

My brother makes beats, and I DJ.

Now we have so many different genres of music, it's amazing to me. Even in the gospel music arena, you've got hip-hop, you got contemporary, urban contemporary, you got traditional, you got neo-soul gospel, you've got all of these different things.

I actually only started listening to house music around the time I started making it. I got hooked both to making music and to house music.

My music, my whole approach to the synthesizer has completely changed now.

For the chorus of 'Secrets,' we used The Romantics' 'Talking in Your Sleep' and 'Pale Shelter' by Tears for Fears. It's like hip-hop: just grab it.

When you mention Bieber, Lorde, One Direction, I want to be on that list. But at the same time, when you say Lil Uzi Vert, I want my name to pop up, too. I'm kinda in between both. I wanna bring them together and exist.

I worked with different producers from all genres, trying to bridge different styles of music, from urban to electronica to ballads.

I grew up in Mountain Pine, Arkansas. You get no more country than where I grew up. But I also grew up in the Napster / iTunes / Spotify/ iHeart Radio era, and so I see that everything is influenced by everything else, and that's what country music is now.