Sometimes hard times can turn out to be the best of luck. There is nothing like a little parental abuse -- or substance abuse -- to burnish an artist's street credibility. Everyone from Eminem to Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor to, more locally, DJ Krush has a rough past.
So one can be forgiven for flinching a little as Takashige Miyawaki describes his evolution into DJ Moochy. After all, we've heard the story many times before. His biography is a record company exec's dream: A hardened juvenile delinquent, hanging out with gamblers and drug addicts, is transformed by the power of music into that most trendy of creatures, a DJ.
"At 16, I was in hell," he relates in a recent interview. "My environment was very violent. There were a lot of people getting stabbed around me. I was working in the construction industry with people on the lowest rung of society, people who existed on sex, drugs and gambling.