walking upstream…
Joji
George Kusunoki Miller built his first audience as Filthy Frank, a deliberately repulsive YouTube shock-comedian who helped kick off the 2013 "Harlem Shake" craze and drew millions of subscribers under a lycra-clad alter ego, Pink Guy. In December 2017 he shut the project down, citing creative exhaustion and a neurological condition causing stress-induced seizures. "It was the only and biggest changing point," he said afterward; "my whole mentality changed." As Joji, he swapped the persona for hushed, minor-key R&B built on a self-taught ear for space, sub-bass, and a slurred, close-mic'd falsetto. His 2018 debut album Ballads 1 made him the first Asian-born artist to top Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart; the piano ballad "Glimpse of Us" (2022) became his biggest hit. The comedian and the confessional singer share one instinct, honed on YouTube: turning private discomfort into something an audience wants to sit inside.
the sound in question
2018
Slow Dancing in the DarkJoji
walk the tributaries ↓
Lil Wayne2000s–10s · Southern hip hop / Trap / Pop rap
Joji's account of becoming a producer starts on one afternoon in sixth grade, in Japan's Kansai region, after a friend's older brother passed him a Lil Wayne CD. "'A Milli' by Lil Wayne came out, and I thought that beat was so cool and so game-changing," Joji told Billboard. "I went home and I opened up GarageBand and I recorded myself... I just remade the beat, and since then, I just kept going at it." He has told the story, almost word for word, to multiple interviewers across a decade — the rarer kind of origin myth, the one that doesn't change in the retelling.
listen: upstream & heresource: Billboard — Joji Video Interview (Lil Wayne / "A Milli" origin story) ↗
2008
A MilliLil Wayne
2018
AttentionJoji
listen forPlay "A Milli" first: three-plus minutes built on one looping vocal chant and a booming, empty low end, no chorus, nothing but the beat repeating under Wayne's verses. Then Joji's "Attention" — a spare piano figure does the same holding work before a blown-out, distorted bass wave floors the track midway through, swallowing his own vocal in fuzz. Different genres, same instinct: strip a beat down until one aggressive low-end move carries the whole song, the exact trick a kid with GarageBand first heard and never let go of.
Shlohmo2010s · Electronic / Wonky / Glitch hop
Joji's admiration for Shlohmo predates his own career: a 2019 Notion Magazine profile reported that the Los Angeles producer, then known for hazy, waterlogged beat music, was someone Joji "fantasised about working with as a teenager." By Ballads 1 (2018) that fantasy was a co-credit — Shlohmo produced and features on "WHY AM I STILL IN LA," which one reviewer described as bookending "a chugging, distorted guitar/bass crescendo with softly sung falsettos." Few of Joji's admitted influences left an actual fingerprint on a finished record; this one did.
listen: upstream & heresource: Notion Magazine — The Joker ↗
2015
Bo Peep (Do U Right)Shlohmo
2018
WHY AM I STILL IN LAJoji
listen forShlohmo's "Bo Peep (Do U Right)" pulls a pitched, warped guest vocal through a submerged, waterlogged low end that never quite resolves into a beat. On "WHY AM I STILL IN LA," listen for the same wet, chugging bass under Joji's falsetto, a distorted guitar bending the mix out of tune before the floor drops away entirely — Shlohmo isn't being echoed on this one, he's in the room, six years and one studio session removed from his own record.
James Blake2010s · Electronic / Soul / UK Bass
No interview has Joji naming James Blake directly — the one video where he reportedly did has since been deleted — but two critics independently reached for the same comparison. Reviewing Ballads 1, Notion Magazine's Joe Zadeh wrote that "Joji, I imagine, is how James Blake would've sounded if he was born in 1998 instead of 1988," while another reviewer heard the album's back half revisiting "the type of druggy slow jams that... James Blake put to bed eight years ago" on his 2011 self-titled debut. It's a softer, secondhand kind of lineage — the sound, agreed on twice, standing in for the artist's own word.
listen: upstream & heresource: Notion Magazine — The Joker ↗
2011
Limit to Your LoveJames Blake
2018
Slow Dancing in the DarkJoji
listen forJames Blake's "Limit to Your Love" spends two minutes as barely more than voice and piano before a sub-bass hit drops in so low it registers as pressure rather than pitch. "Slow Dancing in the Dark" pulls the same trick at roughly the same mark — a hushed, multi-tracked falsetto verse giving way to one overwhelming low-end swell doing the emotional work no chorus arrives to do. Whether Joji built that structure from Blake's record or just landed on it independently, the two songs move exactly the same way.