Surfer-DJ Steve Aoki draws “Mikey February-style expressionist lines” at Abu Dhabi wave pool

“Surprised there’s not a toxic surfer calling Steve Aoki a kook so I’ll do it…KOOK!”

If you’re a dancing sorta queen, hands in the air Jackie, wave ‘em wave ‘em daddy, jaw twisting hither and yon, pelvic girdle naturally lubed, you’ll be acutely aware of DJ Steve Aoki’s mixes, notably his version of Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness and the festival staple Boneless. 

Newport-raised Steve Aoki is forty-seven years old and the son of the flamboyant wrestler-turned-entrepreneur Hiroaki “Rocky” Aoki, who built the Benihana restaurant empire from a single hibachi grill in Harlem, and mammy Chizuru Kobayashi, a former bathhouse attendant.

Steve Aoki’s daddy’s story is one of the best.

Rocky, born in Tokyo a few years before the imperialist government bombed the USA, arrived in America in 1959 with three c-notes, a forged college-admission letter, and the sorta grin that would later sell millions of hibachi dinners.

The son of a failed jazz musician, Rocky had already hustled his way onto Japan’s 1960 Olympic wrestling team (flyweight) and fronted a rock band called Rowdy.

In New York he washed dishes at Serendipity, drove an ice-cream truck, and once wrestled a Harlem pimp for $10,000 in a parking lot. He won.

In 1964, with $10,000 saved and a $30,000 loan, he opened the first Benihana on West 56th Street, a little joint with four tables, eight seats each. Critics sneered at the “circus” of knife-flashing Japanese chefs; customers lined up anyway.

Rocky’s genius was theater: the flaming onion volcano, the flying shrimp tail, the communal grill where suburbanites suddenly felt daring.

By 1972 he had taken Benihana public; by the eighties the chain was a global empire, 100 locations strong, and Rocky was worth hundreds of millions.

Steve Aoki’s daddy raced offshore powerboats (once surviving a 200-foot flip in San Francisco Bay), ballooned across the Pacific (nearly dying when he crash-landed in California mendocino vineyards), and collected Ferraris, Harleys, and headlines.

Tabloids lit up about his three marriages, seven children (including Steve Aoki and his supermodel sis Devon), and a 1998 paternity suit that read like soap opera.

He was a swordsman of particular note, partied with Andy Warhol so he might’ve been ambidextrous, as they say, and there was a character in The Wolf of Wall Street based on ol Rocky.

Died in 2008 after getting belted by cirrhosis and diabetes, aged sixty-nine (of course!).

Anyway, his son Steve Aoki likes to surf, as referenced by Chas Smith a couple of months back when the DJ “put on an absolute barrel riding clinic at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch.”

THE BARREL LIFE IS A LONELY ONE

Enter Steve Aoki. The very famous DJ who puts even professional surfer Paul Fisher to shame when it comes to Spotify downloads (14+ million fans as opposed to 16+ million fans…. oh I guess FISHER crushes) recently made his way to Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, up in Lemoore, CA, to show how to barrel both left and right.

Legs, buttocks, arms and head ideal and the vulnerable adult learner who cannot afford the KS Wave Co. price tag, in either Lemoore nor Abu Dhabi, should pull out pad and pen and take serious notes.

It wasn’t a one-off session, either.

And Steve Aoki has proved his barrel wrangling sesh at Kelly Slater’s pool was no fluke by repeating his Mikey February style expressionist lines at the Abu Dhabi tank, which is a lightly modified version of the Slater pool in Lemoore.

Fans were mostly kind, yeah ripping, dayum, what can’t you do, etc, although wherever positivity shines, a troll is there to throw, as the expression goes, shade.

Surprised there’s not a toxic surfer calling Steve a kook so I’ll do it KOOK

How about get barrelled next time.

Kidding aside, ol Steve Aoki draws a pretty decent sorta line into the tube.

Or kook?