Rina Sawayama seems to be publicly speaking out against Matty Healy, her labelmate at Dirty Hit Records. Sawayama made a statement dragging Healy on Saturday (June 24) during her set at Glastonbury Festival. Though she didn’t say his name, she referenced controversial comments The 1975 frontman has been a part of in recent months and dedicated her song “STFU!” his way.
“I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of these microaggressions. So tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches ‘Ghetto Gaggers’ and mocks Asian people on a podcast. He also owns my masters,” she said. “I’ve had enough!”
Sawayama followed “STFU!” with her take on Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.”
In her onstage outcry at Glastonbury, Sawayama was referring to Healy’s appearance on an episode of The Adam Friedland Show in February that has since been removed from Apple and Spotify. The episode had the show’s hosts making racist jokes about rapper Ice Spice sounding like an “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady,” and they mockingly imitated Chinese and Hawaiian accents. Also in the episode, they joked about Healy watching “Ghetto Gaggers” pornography.
Healy later half-apologized for laughing at and engaging with the hosts’ remarks during an April concert in Auckland, New Zealand. “I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you,” he said at the time. “Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a d—. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry. I don’t want it to be misconstrued as mean.”
Healy commented on the situation again in a quote published by the The New Yorker in May.
“Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy. That doesn’t happen,” he said.
“You’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar,” he continued, addressing people who said they were offended by the remarks. “You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”
Healy was formerly a director at Dirty Hit, the record label to which Sawayama and The 1975 are both signed, but in April reportedly stepped down from that role. The 1975’s manager, Jamie Oborne, is one of the founders of the British indie label.
Sawayama signed with the label in 2019, and in 2020 “STFU!” became the lead single from her debut album, Sawayama. She covered The 1975’s “Love It If We Made It” for the deluxe edition of Sawayama, released via Dirty Hit.
Watch a clip of Sawayama speaking to the Glastonbury crowd ahead of “STFU!” below.
