A Quote by Hardwell

A lot of people always see the EDM DJs as button pushers, especially when deadmau5 came up with that term. Well actually I started out as a hip-hop DJ and I won several awards in Holland for my skills.
I just think a lot of people don't give credit to EDM producers or DJs. People think they're just button pushers and just get on stage and don't really perform.
There have been a lot of people involved in the growth of EDM's support in the U.S., from DJ/producers like David Guetta, Deadmau5 and Skrillex, to major festival organisers and pop artists of EDM integrating elements of dance music into their music.
I grew up listening to a lot of rap music. My dad's a DJ from Brooklyn, and he's a very soulful guy, so he always spun a lot of hip-hop, and that's where I get a lot of my hip-hop influence.
I'm a hip-hop head, but hip-hop actually introduced me to other genres of music because I started to wonder where a lot of these samples came from. So I fell in love with Bobby Womack or Willie Hutch because I wanted to know where those samples came from.
I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.
Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that's what hip-hop has always been about for me.
DJs play a big responsibility of what hip-hop is doing... At the end of the day, it's up to us to control and to own hip-hop. DJs need to challenge us rappers. They got so much power, they need to challenge us.
I started DJing soundclashes. I used to go to Jamaica a lot. I was like a hip-hop sound boy, where I took the dancehall culture and mixed it up with the hip-hop as well. I kept going, going, and I got real hot in the streets of Miami - you know, doing pirate radio - then ended up doing 99 Jamz, the big station out there.
Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.
I made my name and reputation DJing in hip-hop clubs in New York. 'Celebrity DJ' is a term that I hated. To me a celebrity DJ is someone that's on 'Big Brother' or in some kind of B-movie who gets a gig to DJ even though they're not talented enough to do it.
I actually came from the fashion side, so maybe I knew more about fashion - and music like hip-hop because I was a DJ - so it was really successful when we mixed it all up together.
There needs to be structures in place to do something about misrepresentation about hip hop. When awards are given out and the media talk about hip hop, they're confused because they haven't done their homework on it so you have a case where there's an award for the most pop song in the world and it's called 'hip hop'.
Everyone uses grime as a footstool, but imagine Biggie Smalls started doing hip hop, and it started going well, and then he started making RnB: there would be no hip hop!
Well, a lot of people within government and big business are nervous of Hip Hop and Hip Hop artists, because they speak their minds. They talk about what they see and what they feel and what they know. They reflect what's around them.
There are not necessarily a lot of DJs are coming to Israel, so the moment an EDM DJ is coming to Israel, you can tell that people are way more excited and are looking forward... to the show.
I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don't use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it's strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.
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