"For cubic U I didn't know how it all got started at all"
About this Quote
"For cubic U" is the tell. It frames the confession as liner-note intimacy rather than grand statement, like a backstage aside smuggled into the official record. Cubic U was Utada's early, English-language project - the pre-fame laboratory that gets retroactively treated as foreshadowing. By saying they didn't know how it began, Utada resists that tidy retrofitting. The subtext is that beginnings are messy, often accidental: a bedroom experiment, a parent pushing, a fleeting obsession with sound, a need to escape. Pop biographies want a single ignition point; real creative lives tend to be a tangle of half-choices and lucky collisions.
Context matters because Utada's public identity has always been overdetermined: bilingual, bicultural, industry-connected, teen phenomenon. This sentence quietly reclaims ordinary uncertainty. It also doubles as a gentle warning to the audience: don't confuse early work with a prophecy. Sometimes an era happens because a person keeps making music until the music becomes a person. That humility is not self-effacement; it's control. By refusing a clean origin narrative, Utada protects the right to evolve without being trapped by the first draft of their legend.
Quote Details
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hikaru, Utada. (2026, January 15). For cubic U I didn't know how it all got started at all. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-cubic-u-i-didnt-know-how-it-all-got-started-83970/
Chicago Style
Hikaru, Utada. "For cubic U I didn't know how it all got started at all." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-cubic-u-i-didnt-know-how-it-all-got-started-83970/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"For cubic U I didn't know how it all got started at all." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/for-cubic-u-i-didnt-know-how-it-all-got-started-83970/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

