EDM is huge. Not just in popularity and money, but in spectacle. Every festival, Las Vegas residency and international tour from the big guns of heavy drops and molly-popping arm waving is competing to be the hugest, most sensational live experience – exploding the role of the DJ well beyond the realms of knob twiddling into full on rock-stardom. This description applies to no DJ more than it does Steve Aoki who, as reported widely this morning, is currently being sued by a fan who claims he broke her neck at one of his 2012 shows.News stories are currently indicating that during his set at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, Aoki slung a rubber raft into the crowd before jumping 20 feet into it. This is a regular feature of his live antics, allowing the DJ to crowd surf in the boat. Unfortunately in this case, it seems that the impact of Aoki landing in the boat was fully felt by one audience member who was knocked unconscious. The injured attendee, Brittany Hickman, has stated that she then visited her doctor who told her she would need three days in hospital and a further two months away from work. She also went on to add that if she had attempted to raise her arms or somehow soften the blow she could have ended up paralysed completely. You can see a video of the incident below.Aoki is well known for offering a pretty full on live show, perhaps best encapsulated by his 'cake-face' routine, where he lobs huge cakes into the faces of his crowd. Granted he is yet to snap anybody's spine with a sponge, but the schtick has long been a trope of just how literally in-your-face EDM has become: the practice of waiting for a huge, sticky drop before actually dropping something huge and sticky onto the crowd. It's all good fun, and is one of the reasons he is so popular as a performer, but the whole cake thing has led to criticism from those who feel the excess of EDM is diluting the whole raison d'être of dance music, making it more about stunts and gimmicks, and less about mixing.News of the spinal injury lawsuit comes less than a week after Aoki was forced to cancel a string of dates in order to have surgery on his vocal chords. The reason for this operation, according to a self-issued statement, is 20 long years screaming at all of his shows. Once again, pushing the limits of showmanship to their most painful conclusion, it seems that he has clearly yelled "WHO WANTS A CAKE IN THEIR FACE", or something similar, so many times at such an extreme volume, his throat has given up. It shouldn't be ignored that this clearly shows how much Aoki is giving during his shows – you have to be pretty enthusiastic to yell your own voice out of being – but it is striking that a DJ, traditionally a role carried out stood in one place selecting pre-recorded noises, has injured himself and another through jumping off the stage and shouting.The San Diego incident shouldn't be taken lightly, and Aoki has clearly been rocked by the case, saying in a statement that he "would never want anybody to get hurt at one of his shows". It is also incredibly stale to get pious about EDM, and criticism leveled at it often comes off at best pissing in the wind against a billion dollar industry, and at worst condescending to a movement that clearly has serious popular appeal. Yet Aoki's live show and recent entanglements are starting to become a parable about excess, a simple morality tale about a humble DJ who became so obsessed with yelling and throwing cake and crowd-surfing, he broke somebody's neck, lost his voice and had to cancel his shows. The moral being that whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Or whoever jumps twenty feet off a rig into a rubber dinghy rested on the heads of teenagers, might end up snapping one of their necks.Follow Angus on Twitter.
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