DJ SKU

If it’s late at night and you’re not dancing to the beats spewing forth from his speakers, Corey Aguilar, aka DJ Sku (pronounced “skew”), is gonna want to know why. The 28-year-old DJ dominates the Kansas City dance scene because he makes it his personal mission to reach each person in the crowd, a game he plays with himself while cueing up the next track in his musical cocktail. Aguilar wants to know, Can I get that guy to bob his head to the next song?

Anyone familiar with Aguilar’s party-rocking skills already knows the answer. Advances in audio technology have made it possible for anyone to call themselves a DJ, in the same way that blogging has leveled the playing field for aspiring writers. But in a field of iPod DJs, someone with tested turntable ability will tower above the rest.

Aguilar taught himself to DJ in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Topeka, Kansas, beginning in 1997. At times, Aguilar felt alone in his love for the DJ culture amid Kansas cornfields. He mixed electronic music first, mostly house and hard-house out of Chicago and L.A. He gobbled up every available VHS tape on how to DJ, and if there was a rave in Kansas City, Aguilar was there, perched over the DJ’s shoulder like a starving man watching someone eat a McRib.

In Kansas City, “a lot of the DJs up here were my influences, Pat Nice, DJ True, and they don’t even know that,” Aguilar says. “I was like, okay, right, oh, I need those fuzzy things to make the record stick. Slip mats! That’s what those are for!”

When he knew he was good enough, he proved himself by knocking out opponents during the height of the wax-battle era, the late ‘90s and early 2000s. He traveled to Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, coming close to winning battles hosted by Guitar Center but twice coming in second.

True turntablists are hard to come by in Kansas City, but one thing that instantly set DJ Sku apart was his ability to juggle records and make new beats out of well-known vinyl. Many of the area’s club kids hadn’t seen such dexterity until Sku stepped behind the needle.

Aguilar eventually co-hosted a residency called Mass Appeal at the Gaslight Tavern in Lawrence, Kansas, the home of Kansas University, with fellow DJ Oscar Slugworth. Underground hip-hop dominated Mass Appeal, and so for awhile, Aguilar was known strictly as a hip-hop DJ, though his tastes range much wider.
Soon, Aguilar was building a reputation in both Lawrence and Kansas City, so much so that readers voted him Best DJ in The Pitch, the area’s weekly Village Voice Media newspaper, three years running. He’s worked on critically-acclaimed collaborations with underground hip-hop artists like Approach, who now lives in San Francisco, and Mac Lethal, signed to the Rhymesayers label. In 2006 he toured internationally with Mac Lethal and Atmosphere, and again on the 2007 Mac Lethal and Atmosphere tour along with Greyskul and LuckyIAm. Also this year, Sku was invited to mix and host “Heat From the Street,” a mixtape distributed by Kansas City radio station 95.7 The Vibe.

Even though Sku has old-school skills that can rip apart adversaries in a battle, he’s able to innovate along with the changing technology. He marvels at the way that DJs can mine MySpace for urls of hot songs the way that they used to dig through crates of vinyl in record stores. “And it’s free. MySpace is the new record shop,” he says. If someone bites his list of urls, it’s no big deal. “There’s so much out there, it’s ridiculous.”And yet the most important thing about Aguilar, beyond his understanding of music and his passion for steering a party in the right direction, is his lack of ego. When it comes down to it, DJ Sku is a really good guy.

“People expect more now when they come to a club,” Aguilar says. “They don’t just want to hear one genre of music all night. I don’t play one genre of music all night. There’s so much easier access to different kinds of music now. You can tell people are evolving musically. It’s kind of crazy to say that.”