One of YouTube’s stranger side coves is the Binaural Beats channel, a collection of droning, synthesized audio tones that promise to deliver the sensations of “digital drug doses.” In this virtual den of depravity, electronic “opium” sprawls out in an oaky, low thrum, and virtual “LSD” keens along in a piercing wobble that fuzzes out like Timothy Leary’s hairline. Auditory alcohol, helpfully, features an illustration of frothy pints to pair with a skittering, Merzbow-worthy hum. Sadly for all iTweakers, though, these clips only deliver a buzz in the acoustic sense.
Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, would slot perfectly into this playlist; it’s also a cheap, placebo imitation of a party. Like Neon Future I and II, the Dim Mak founder’s full-length album set, the four-track effort spackles vaguely futurist clicks and clamors onto staid beats while braying singularly for hedonistic excess; it’s passive EDM calculated to score his cake-flinging, crowd-rafting concert theatrics, where the static nature of the music is muted by frosting wedged into ear canals. In this melee, Aoki’s unrelenting pitched-down vocals and anemic house beats get a dramatic boost; the refrain “Whatever those dope girls sippin’/Is what I’m drinkin’/Pour me one more cup when I'm pimpin’/Pass the keys I’m fuckin’ whipping’’ has a chance at sounding bracing instead of brainless, its attendant bass drop ferocious instead of toothless (“Dope Girlz,” with Shaun Frank). “ILYSM,” with Autoérotique (a Dim Mak signee, as are all the vocalists), might perform a greater alchemy than turning a few callback lines of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down” into a hollow frat roar.
Like many party vices, this flip approach could be embraced if it were fun, which it isn’t. Even at a scant 16-minute runtime, 4OKI is tedious; the bottomed-out dubstep yowling of “The drum kick hits and the kids will die” (“Kids,” with Morten) and shrill siren bleats atop various demands to “Bring the Funk Back” (with Reid Stefan) are interchangeable, down to how they evoke two fax machines in a tumble dryer. Even for a showman who’s admitted that touching his DJ equipment during songs is “not absolutely necessary,” the approach suggests an incurious nature. It’s the sort of enforced, one-note debauchery that disrespects EDM fans, caricaturing them unfairly as libertine halfwits.
Aoki seems in no hurry to experiment with his money-minting formula; the trailer of an upcoming Netflix documentary teases a hero’s arc of him defying the expectations of his father, Benihana tycoon Rocky Aoki, and he dismissed the cake-averse as “haters” and “trolls” in a voluble 2014 essay for The Daily Beast. Most likely, he will savvily outlive the current EDM bubble when it deflates in a flurry of glow sticks and flash tattoos; that documentary is, after all, called I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. But if every generation rebels against their parents, it breeds hope for our future–because it means that someday when Aoki pivots back on his artificial hip, desserts at the ready, the new guard will stand in implacable silence, demanding dance music that is more than empty calories.
