From YouTube troll to successful singer. if many know him today thanks to his titles give me Love Where glimpse of usStayed for several weeks on TikTok trends, George Miller aka Joji actually hides quite an original past.
YouTube star and inventor of the Harlem Shake, this 30-year-old Japanese-Australian musician and songwriter is now one of the most popular artists of his generation. While his third album, baptized Smithereenspublished this Friday, returns to the rise of this UFO born on the Internet.
Harlem Shake and Pink Guy
In 2013, a trend is going around the world: the Harlem Shake. The goal, to film themselves in a group, dancing ridiculously, often in disguise, to a song of the same name by the American DJ Baauer. If tens of thousands of videos will later be posted online, it is George Miller, a Japanese teenager living in Osaka, to whom we owe this planetary phenomenon.
The young man made a name for himself on YouTube in 2008, with his channel called DizastaMusic, in which he makes videos based on absurd humor and jokes, but also quite vulgar sketches where he plays crazy and provocative characters like Filthy Frank and Pink Guy. .
But, in parallel with these escapades, followed by tens of millions of subscribers on YouTube, George Miller, passionate about music, dreams of a career in song. While moving to Brooklyn, the young man assumed the identity of his character PinkGuy, an irreverent rapper dressed in a pink jumpsuit, and released two mixtapes (PINK BOY Y pink season) then an EP (Pink Season: The Prophecy).
“I have always wanted to make music. I just created the YouTube channel to give it a boost. But then things with Filthy Frank and Pink Guy got a lot bigger than he imagined, and I had to deal with it,” Joji said in a 2017 interview with the media. pigeons and planes.
These projects are like George Miller’s videos, vulgar and humorous, but nevertheless have the merit of addressing many important social issues in unconventional ways, such as the coming to power of Donald Trump (gay 4 donald), carry arms (I have a gun) or clichés about the white American population (white is correct).
more personal music
Despite his success, in 2017, George Miller drew a definitive line with his past as a YouTuber, to focus on more authentic and personal music. He deactivates his chains on the platform and adopts a new name, Joji, which is none other than his first name pronounced with a Japanese accent.
It is in this context that arises in tongues, their first EP released in late 2017, on 88rising, an American label that highlights emerging Asian artists. Thanks to this signature, Joji stops hiding behind a character and develops his own musical identity: a mix between R & B, lo-fi but also cloud rap, accompanied by moving and dark lyrics.
Initially, this drastic change in identity struggled to resonate with Miller fans accustomed to his old YouTube content. But through the increasingly introspective tracks and projects, Joji manages to convince the audience of him.
The success of his album proves it. ballads 1– used by singles Yes of course Where slow dancing in the dark – which rose to the top of the list of the best hip-hop and R&B albums of Billboard, making Joji the first Asian artist to achieve such a performance. The clip has been viewed 341 million times on YouTube.
Success on TikTok
After a second album Nectarin 2020, also crowned with success, Joji returns this Friday with Smithereenscarried by the bachelor glimpse of us. In this title, the artist compares his old sentimental relationship with the one he currently lives and points out that he is much less in love than with his previous partner.
“Because sometimes I look into his eyes, and that’s when I see an image of the two of us. And I try to fall in love with the touch of him. But I keep thinking about what we could have been before. I’m fine and I’ve moved on. But if I stay here spending time in his arms, it’s just to wait to see a picture of the two of us, ”Joji sings in this title.
glimpse of us is Joji’s most popular track to date, a success that the Australian-Japanese artist surprisingly owes once again to a social network: TikTok. But, far from the jokes that launched his career, this title, viral on the Chinese platform, has been taken up more than a million times by Internet users, sharing their fears in his romantic relationships.
Source: BFM TV
