Cake, Chaos, Dim Mak

Steve Aoki has always operated at the intersection of music, skateboarding, and barely-controlled chaos. The son of Benihana founder Rocky Aoki, he rejected a comfortable inheritance in favor of sleeping on floors and building Dim Mak Records from a hardcore punk imprint into one of the most recognizable names in electronic music. By 2012 he was throwing cakes at audiences and crowd-surfing in inflatable rafts—which sounds like a gimmick until you see how genuinely unhinged his shows actually get—and his debut album Wonderland was about to drop that autumn, years after he’d proved the concept live. The spectacle is the point. The kids had something to say, and he was going to make sure the volume was loud enough.