Joji Returns with "A Glimpse of Us"

By Jacob Olaguir | June 28th, 2022

Hello everyone, my name is Jacob Olaguir and I recently started working for AAPIRC this summer. For this week's Visibility Blog, I wanted to talk about the newest song by Japanese singer Joji. This is one of my favorite Asian artists and I have followed his career since I was in high school. It is amazing to see a Japanese artist make it into the mainstream of western culture. If you visit AAPIRC this week you might see a vinyl hanging on the wall of Joji's freshman album “BALLADS 1” which was released October 26, 2018. It has been almost 2 years since Joji released his Sophomore album titled “Nectar” which came out September 25, 2020. Joji fans have been wondering if he was done with music after a prolonged absence from social media and lack of physical appearances. June 10th, 2022 is when Joji released “A Glimpse of Us” a song that runs for 3 minutes and 54 seconds. The song tells the story of a failing relationship between two individuals because of one's feelings for their former lover (Source: Genius.com). This is evident from the Chorus: “Cause’ sometimes I look in her eyes, and that’s where I find a glimpse of us”. Joji has said in interviews that the music that he writes is not autobiographical but just what he is feeling at the time. The song is an excellent example of perspective storytelling accompanied with beautiful production done by Connor McDonough which entails a lot of piano and somber melodies. Joji is a really talented artist that is set to go on tour later this year and I hope to attend one of his concerts. I would definitely recommend everyone check out this song. As of June 24, 2022 it has accumulated 110 million streams on Spotify and continues to get millions of streams as the days go by.

One of my favorite classes I have ever taken at UNM was “The Perception of Blackness” with Professor Finnie Coleman. If you ever get a chance to take a class with him, you will not regret it. He is one of the most intelligent and articulate professors I have ever taken a class with and I really learned a lot. I wanted to bring that class up because although the class was about how Black people are viewed in society. I remember a section of the class that talked about music being one of the tools that the Black community used to liberate themselves. I remember writing a response to this concept with the idea that the same tools used to liberate the Black community can be emulated by other ethnic minority
groups to change the public's perception of that ethnic group.

Joji was a case study for my response because I wanted to highlight an immigrant's story of being proud of his heritage and partnering with 88Rising to headline one of biggest Asian music and arts festivals in the United States called “Head in the Clouds”. The significance of this to me shows that your culture or your heritage is nothing to be ashamed of but is something that if you honor, success will come your way.