Rina Sawayama had a few choice words for her labelmate Matty Healy of The 1975.
During her performance at the Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts, Sawayama, 32, said her song “STFU!” was inspired by being “sick and tired of microaggressions” she’s faced with certain people in her label.
“So, tonight, this song goes out to a white man who watches (white men degrading Black women in pornography) and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” Sawayama said, in reference to Healy’s controversial comments on “The Adam Friedland Show’ in February.
The Japanese and British singer added: “He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.”
Sawayama and Healy are both signed by the record label Dirty Hit, which is run by The 1975’s band manager Jamie Oborne. Healy previously served as a director of Dirty Hit from December 2018 to April of this year.
USA TODAY reached out to reps for Sawayama and Dirty Hit.
Why is Matty Healy controversial?
In February, Healy came under fire for his appearance on the podcast “The Adam Friedland Show,” during which hosts Friedland and Nick Mullen mocked the rapper Ice Spice, making disparaging comments about her body and ethnicity. Later in the episode, Healy asked the hosts for their impressions of Japanese people working in concentration camps.
The 1975 musician also said he had a preference for a category of pornography in which Black women are being degraded specifically by white men.
Healy and Ice Spice’s representatives did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.
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What has Healy said about the controversy?
Healy offered an apology to Ice Spice while performing onstage in Auckland, New Zealand, according to a fan video of his comments posted on Twitter in late April.
“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 (mean),” he said. “I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry. I don’t want anything like that to be misconstrued to be mean.”
He continued: “I am genuinely sorry if I upset her because I (expletive) love her.”
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In a New Yorker profile, published on June 5, Healy downplayed the podcast controversy.
“It doesn’t actually matter,” he said. “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.
“If it does,” he continued, “you’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. 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.”
Contributing: Patrick Ryan and Edward Segarra
