Rina Sawayama, a rock musician who was born in Japan but emigrated to the UK has thrown a verbal grenade that fans believe was intended for The 1975 frontman Matty Healy.
The impassioned tirade occurred just before Sawayama performed her hit song “STFU” during the British music festival Glastonbury.
“I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of these micro-aggressions,” the singer exclaimed in front of thousands of fans.
“This goes out to a white man that watches Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast.
“He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.”
Although she didn’t mention Healy by name, he fits Sawayama’s description.
On an episode of The Adam Friedland Show in February, the singer admitted to watching Ghetto Gaggers — a genre of pornography that degrades black women.
For context, one Reddit user described the genre as “the most extreme niche porn you probably can find” and that is it “specifically about white men getting off on racially and sexually degrading black women”.
On that same podcast, Friedland and co-host Nick Mullen debated whether Ice Spice, the 23-year-old rapper from New York was Hawaiian, Inuit or Chinese.
The singer laughed along as the pair subsequently mocked those accents per The Hollywood Reporter.
The episode has since been removed from Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Sawayama also mentioned that Healy “owns her masters”.
The 1975 and Sawayama are both signed to the UK label Dirty Hit according to The Independent which contacted both the label and Healy for comment.
Healy was the director of Dirty Hit’s parent company, Dirty Hit Limited, from 2018 until April 2023.
In April, Healy made what has been widely described as a half-baked apology for his awful comments during a gig in Auckland, New Zealand.
“Ice Spice, I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that my joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry,” he said to the crowd.
Taylor Swift, who was dating Healy at the time (the horror!), then collaborated with Ice Spice on an updated version of her track “Karma”.
Back when the track was released in May, some Swifties believed that teaming up with Ice Spice could’ve been Swift’s first step in attempting to clean up the image of a man who once performed what looked like a Nazi salute on stage.
