Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.
A trendsetter in the electronic dance music genre lays down a portrait of self-discovery in shades of blue.
Growing up “the only Asian kid in a lily-white, same-seeming neighborhood [in] Newport Beach, California,” Aoki, one of the world’s most popular DJs, portrays himself as “the quintessential outsider.” He was an equal mix of his larger-than-life, Benihana restaurant–founding father and his more reserved mother—“a compassionate soul. A gentle spirit. An open mind.” He spent his youth stirring restlessly in the sanctuary of music, devoting himself first to Michael Jackson and later to hardcore and punk, all of which would inform his future sound as a leader in the EDM scene. “[I] wasn’t planning on becoming a DJ. Never even thought about it,” he writes. “And so the story of how I went from an aspiring musician to a promoter to a record label ‘executive’ to where I am now is a lesson in resilience, resourcefulness.” Detailing those lessons, Aoki moves through the years, from his earliest hardcore garage band memories and 1996 founding of Dim Mak Records to his first appearances at Coachella, when he was still searching for his voice. Eventually developing motifs such as “caking” audiences that came to embody his style, he matured as an artist and eventually achieved whirlwind notoriety that quickly spun into icon status among denizens of the EDM subculture. Throughout, the author shares candid self-assessments and revealing insights about major events in his life, including his divorce, his father’s death, and his struggles with drinking. As he writes, “I didn’t realize it at the time but my early shows had no essence to them…no heart…no personality. I couldn’t put myself into what I was doing because I was hiding in the fog of being drunk….Connectivity…that became my thing. Should have been my thing all along.”
Part celebration, part poignant reflection, Aoki’s life story is as rhythmic and textured as his music.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11167-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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