You’d think that British-Japanese singer Rina Sawayama would muster up some new material for her concerts. Instead, for the second time in a month, she took the opportunity to “call out” 1975 frontman Matty Healy on stage, for laughing at a joke somebody else made months ago. How 2023!
During her set at NOS Alive in Portugal on Saturday, Sawayama went on a rant during her performance of “STFU!,” her song about “dealing with microaggressions.”
“So I’ve been thinking a lot about apologies. Isn’t it funny how some people get away with not apologizing ever?” she said. “For saying some racist shit, for saying some sexist shit? So let’s try this: why don’t you apologize for once in your life without making it about your fucking self?”
Her comments come after Healy, who recently dated Taylor Swift, received backlash for comments made on The Adam Friedland Show Podcast, upon which he appeared in February. In the episode, Healy claimed that he once slid into rapper Ice Spice’s direct messages and didn’t get a response. Ice Spice was introduced as an “attractive woman who released one song,” and show co-hosts Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen then called her an “Inuit Spice girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady,” going on to do impressions of Chinese and Hawaiian accents. Healy didn’t join in with the mocking, but did laugh and say, “Yeah, that’s what Ice Spice is like.” What he didn’t do was sanctimoniously challenge Friedland and Mullen, for which, apparently, he should be worthy of your scorn.
The podcast hosts also recounted the conclusion a night out they’d had with Healy in London where a female friend of theirs had supposedly walked in on the singer masturbating to VR pornography.
All these comments, Cockburn hastens to point out, are dripping with irony… yet for once it’s the American podcasters who “get irony” and the British singer Sawayama who appears not to. Isn’t there a term for such an occurrence…?
Sawayama made similar comments at Glastonbury in the UK last month when she appeared to dedicate the same song, “STFU,” to Healy. “Tonight this goes out to a white man that watches ‘Ghetto Gaggers’ and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” she screamed at the crowd, adding, “He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.”
Cockburn’s nieces have been decoding all the drama for him, explaining their theory that Sawayama is making a play for the affections of Taylor Swift’s, er, passionate online fanbase, who also vehemently disliked Healy for being problematic by sharing a platform with those nasty podcasters. Cockburn’s nieces also introduced him to the concerned parties’ music: Swift, the 1975, Ice Spice, Sawayama, the lot. His verdict: it’s all pretty good! Why the imbroglio?!
Following the backlash to the comments made on Friedland’s podcast, Healy told the New Yorker that he thought the controversy about the episode “actually doesn’t matter” as he believes “nobody is sitting there at night, slumped at their computer” feeling upset because of what he said. Well, it turns out that, for attention, Rina Sawayama is!
