(Warning in case you’ve got profanity-sensitive kids around: the video for “STFU” doesn’t actually say “STFU.” But honestly the f-bomb isn’t anywhere near as offensive as the stuff the boorish guy keeps saying in the first couple of minutes of this video).
Anyway, Rina Sawayama is awesome AF. I heard about her from a “Records in My Life” interview with, unsurprisingly, a few members of Dirty Projectors, in which Felicia Douglas picked Sawayama as an artist she’d recently gotten into via social media. I’m grateful for the reference, because I admit I probably would’ve skipped over Sawayama’s music, because I didn’t understand what she was doing with it.
In short, she’s treating genre as irrelevant, and glamour as irrelevant, combining hooks from pop, dance music, and R&B with heavy metal and whatever the hell else she wants. The result is that it feels like she’s tearing down preconceptions from the inside. She knows that people are going to make assumptions and “read” her as Japanese even though she grew up in England, and dismiss her as “just” a beautiful model instead of as an artist.
Even though I think the song itself is nice but kind of unremarkable, the video for “Bad Friend” is brilliant. It mimics a Japanese TV broadcast of a drama from the late 50s or 60s, with Sawayama in drag as a middle-aged man who’s his own worst enemy. From the sound of the song, you’d never expect it to be a beginning-to-end faithful homage to Tokyo Story-style dramas, much less that the singer would portray herself as a man getting in a bar fight until his hands are bloodied.
But I get the feeling that Sawayama is treating all of it as drag. The video for “XS” first comes across as an R&B-inspired dance pop song, but it’s immediately apparent that that’s just the hook that skims along the surface, in between a metal riff and what sounds like taiko drums and a little bit of flute that seems to mock the idea (or at least lean into the idea) that Japanese culture is alien and exotic. Sawayama’s in drag for this one, too: in the double role of a hyper-excited QVC host and the hyper-sexualized alien creature whose essential juices are being harvested for the product she’s selling.
So again: Rina Sawayama is fantastic, doing pop music with a sensibility that’s somewhere between glam and punk. I think the thing I like best about her work is that she probably doesn’t give a damn what I think of it.