Influences:
- James Blake, Radiohead, Shlohmo, Childish Gambino, Flying Lotus
George Kusunoki Miller (b. September 18, 1992) is a Japanese singer-songwriter, rapper and producer who creates music under the stage name Joji and rose to online fame as the creator of Filthy Frank.
Miller started out as an independent entertainer, initially intending for the Filthy Frank show to give his music a platform, and even creating the character of Pink Guy as an In-Universe musical outlet in the show. However, he had to make do with the show's popularity eclipsing his individual work, and would struggle between pursuing his own aspirations and pleasing fans for several more years.
The first creative era of Joji (2014-2016) exists as a number of lo-fi hip-hop and alternative R&B SoundCloud singles for the likely-never-to-be-released project Chloe Burbank, Vol. 1. Although Miller intended to keep the music a secret from his fanbase and released it under an alias, his association was leaked rather quickly.
The second era (starting around 2017) began once Miller got onto the 88rising label, where he began issuing official releases, collaborating with prominent artists such as Rich Brian and Lil Yachty, and developing a more defined sound and voice.
Around the same time, Miller officially announced the cancellation of the Filthy Frank show, citing intensifying health concerns and personal loss of interest. Joji has been his main creative focus ever since, and with his subsequent rise in mainstream prominence, many online (both fans of the show and otherwise) have held him up as a successful example of the famously difficult task of a musician gaining a following on YouTube and having the marketing acumen to shed their "YouTuber" image and be taken seriously as an artist.
Not to be confused with Joji Nakata or director George Miller.
Discography:
Pink Guy
- Pink Guy (2014)
- Pink Season (2017)
Joji
- In Tongues (EP) (2017)
- BALLADS1 (2018)
- Nectar (2020)
- Smithereens (2022)
In Tropes:
- Absurdly-Long Limousine: The video for "Run" is a rare case where this is Played for Horror. It begins with Joji waking up in the back of a limo with no clue how he got there, surrounded by party-goers who show no concern for his confusion and distress. He tries to reach the exit, but no matter how far he runs, the limo just keeps going on and on and on...
- All Caps: How the album title and track names for BALLADS 1 are formatted.
- all lowercase letters: A lot of his songs are titled in this way.
- Bad Boss: Implied in the music video for "Gimme Love". Within the rapid-fire clips of whatever the story is, Joji rises through the ranks of a space program but can be seen regularly abusing the scientists and engineers under his command.
- Bilingual Bonus: The start of "you suck charlie" has Joji saying :ま、今夜は本気でやってもらいますね" ("Well, you'll do it for me tonight right?") and "おねがいします"("Please").
- Black Is Bigger in Bed: Downplayed, but the music video for "CAN'T GET OVER YOU" starts with Joji rollerskating around the city in a tux with a bouquet of flowers for his girlfriend/love interest only to see her getting closer with a black man. This sends Joji into a Despair Event Horizon.
- Deconstruction: The music video for "Glimpse of Us" is shot similar to an old Filthy Frank video, with grainy footage and amateur, guerrilla-style filming featuring various scenes of the protagonists hanging out in messy, cramped conditions and messing around in public. Unlike Filthy Frank, the dirty conditions and the antics of the protagonists are not played for laughs: the video gives a feeling of sadness and unease of the protagonists' lifestyle that consists of them committing petty crimes and partying, which gets them in trouble with the law, alienates them from their girlfriends, and makes some of the gang members distressed to the point of going into a Troubled Fetal Position and even hitting themselves.
- Echoing Acoustics: Reverb is an integral part of Joji's spacey, atmospheric sound.
- Fan Disservice: The booty-shaking dancers in "yeah right," only seen from the waist down... and in between them, Joji, looking like he's on the verge of passing out.
- Fauns and Satyrs: For some reason; Joji has the legs of a goat in "SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK".
- If I Can't Have You…: "CAN'T GET OVER YOU" explicitly states it at the end of the chorus.
- Important Haircut: In the video for "CAN'T GET OVER YOU", Joji enthusiastically roller skates through the streets with a bouquet of flowers for his love interest, but is heartbroken when he sees her with another man. It then cuts to Joji getting his hair shaved short by some gangbangers. He spends the rest of the video, now a part of the gang with a mostly blank, serious expression on his face.
- Insistent Terminology: Joji makes it clear in one Instagram post promoting "Walking" that he is NOT a lobster in the music video, but an amphipod.
- Instrumentals: He made a lot of them in his earlier days ("joe pass", "luv u", "foie", "medicine beat", etc).
- Lighter and Softer: A weird mix of this and Darker and Edgier when compared to his comedy music. It's nowhere near as obscene or offensive as his Pink Guy material, but it's also a lot more serious and emotionally mature.
- Limited Lyrics Song: Most of his songs are this.
- Lucky Charms Title: "WORLD$TAR MONEY
". - Lyrical Cold Open: "Old Yeller".
- Lyrical Dissonance: "CAN'T GET OVER YOU" has a pretty upbeat and cutesy beat which wouldn't be out of place in an Adventure Time episode. Listening to the lyrics more closely reveals it's about a Crazy Jealous Guy who talks about threatening the girl he's into for not being with him, even saying If I Can't Have You….
- Mind Screw: The video to "Run" prominently features an exhausted Joji frantically trying to escape a seemingly endless limo party, whose endlessness increasingly becomes the least surreal thing going on. The epilogue features him breaking through a glass door, cutting to footage of him running in desert flats, then cutting to him waking up in what's implied to be the spaceship from "Sanctuary" as an ominous computer voice tells him to "wake up."
- Miniscule Rocking: His longest songs are generally 3 minutes long.
- My Nayme Is: George Miller goes by the name Joji under this project, effectively the Japanese equivalent/pronunciation of the name "George".
- Necessarily Evil: An extremely bittersweet version of this plays out in the music video for "Sanctuary"; after Joji and his entire space crew become depressed after finally defeating his Arch-Enemy, his partner sees fit to become their new enemy (even sacrificing his eye to fit the look) just to give his friends something to live for again.
- Perishing Alt-Rock Voice: He's got a knack for sounding perpetually sleep-deprived, especially in his more recent work.
- Renaissance Man: Certainly a man of many talents. He's a singer, songwriter, producer, comedic writer, video editor, actor, rapper, beatboxer, and breakdancer. These talents are showcased in his current music and videos and Filthy Frank alike.
- Re Release The Song: After being initially released in the Chloe Burbank era on his Soundcloud, "worldstar money" finally saw an official release as the closing track on In Tongues.
- Sampling:
- Signature Style: Echo, short piano loops, ambient sounds, and a slow, relaxed vibe.
- Silly Love Songs: Averted with "i don't wanna waste my time". On surface, it sounds like a love song, but it's actually about cheating on a girl.
- Song Style Shift: The first half of "Gimme Love" is done in the style of an energetic pop tune with a driving beat, while the second half slows down considerably and becomes a more ethereal, acoustic/choral ballad with nary a hint of percussion.
- Space Opera: The music video for "Sanctuary" is a parody of the traditional genre archetype, featuring lo-fi video quality, Rubber-Forehead Aliens, and crummy spaceship fights.
- Stepford Smiler: "Pretty Boy" is sung from the perspective of a narrator putting on the bluster of a typical rich Pretty Boy to hide from the public his major insecurities and existential fears.
- Stylistic Suck:
- The video for "yeah right" consists entirely of videotaped footage, showing Joji in various states of physical, mental and emotional disrepair. They're shot in locales ranging from under a bridge to the interior of a deli. Several shots are oversaturated to the point of playback errors or feature Jittercam along with manual close-ups. One shows Joji in front of a TV giving a "NO SIGNAL" message.
- In the music video for "Sanctuary", the effects are serviceable and the set design detailed and pretty, but the shots of spacecraft flying around are very obviously cheaply-made miniatures on Chroma Key.
- "Pretty Boy" is much more rough and dissonant compared to much of the rest of Nectar, hearkening more back to the earlier, more lo-fi based days of Joji. Its video is equally low-grade, featuring VHS-quality recordings of middle-aged men with very dubious makeup.
- The album cover for BALLADS 1 is a blurry portrait of him (likely cropped from a larger photo) with strong use of flash, red-eye effect and everything.
- Surreal Music Video: The video for "will he" is... strange. As is the one for "Your Man".
- Textless Album Cover: All of his album covers (aside from Smithereens, which nevertheless still counts) are just portraits of him with no text.
- Toku: The music video for "Walking" is a parody of it, with Joji in a giant lobster monster suit fighting Jackson Wang piloting a skyscraper-sized mech in a large city diorama.
- Three Chords and the Truth: A lot of his SoundCloud-era instrumentals consisted of a piano loop with ambient sounds or a short acoustic melody.
- Uncanny Valley:
- The video for "Pretty Boy" features this (and is almost assuredly intentional based on the song's themes), prominently featuring a trio of seemingly middle-aged men who have been made-up to the point where it looks like they've been stung by a bee or injected with an unhealthy amount of botox. The bright daylight and the VHS-quality recording do little to make it less unsettling.
- The mysterious astronaut in "Your Man" has strange and jerkish body movements and language, walking like a puppet would at times, all the while trekking and dancing through several dimly lit abandoned buildings and areas. It's never explained why he came there or why there's not a person in sight, albeit it gives off a very post-apocalyptic Dead World vibe. And at the end, returning back to Death Valley, the astronaut takes off his helmet to reveal he's not human, but a humanoid alien who looks up to the sky to see a fleet of other meteors hurling down as he did.
- Uncommon Time: "worldstar money" has sections where it breaks away from the ukulele lead and begins utilizing an incredibly oddly-swung beat that's hard to follow, let alone dance to.
- Victory Is Boring: The primary conflict of "Sanctuary" is Joji as a space captain being depressed a year after defeating his Arch-Enemy.
