Rina Sawayama’s Bold Advocacy for Women in Music
Misogyny in the music Industry is “an endemic”. Rina Sawayama wants to change that.
Hold The Girl, 2023
“I don’t know a single woman in the music industry who has not experienced either misogyny or racism or both,” Rina Sawayama wrote in a story published on International Women’s Day 2024. “Let’s take a second to digest that.”
Sawayama’s narrative was part of an expansive investigative piece published by the Independent in March that focused on harrowing stories of abuse in the UK music industry. This industry, the article points out, has still not experienced its Me Too movement. Instead, Sawayama writes, executives and powerful men in the industry have adjusted their language to evade accountability. “Within the industry, behind closed doors, I’ve noticed how men are now weaponising the language of women’s mental health to masquerade misogyny,” Sawayama wrote. “It’s unacceptable to say a woman is ‘crazy’, but I’ve heard phrases like, ‘I’ve heard she’s going through a really tough time, and she’s not acting like herself’. Often those very men are the ones causing the women distress.”
Sawayama’s contribution to the Independent article was not surprising if you had followed her career for the past year. Last summer, while at Glastonbury, Sawayma dedicated her performance of “STFU” to one man in particular, explaining that she was “sick and tired of the microaggressions” when she wrote the track.
“So, tonight, this song goes out to a man who watches Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” Sawayama declared, referencing comments made by Matt Healy on a podcast, where he laughed about watching porn that humiliates Black women. “He also owns my masters,” she continued. “I’ve had enough.”
The aftermath of Sawayama’s comments was fiery but, unfortunately, missed the point. The public’s focus was not on the inherent misogyny she and other women face, but on the possible moral depravity of the man she didn’t name. For a while, Sawayama took no interviews. When I covered Sawayama’s Lollapalooza performance for this blog, her publicist told me she wouldn't be speaking with the press. Probably for the best, I thought, as I imagined the invasive questions journalists might ask about Healy.
But the point was never just about Healy. Sawayama’s message was about the systematic abuse and a lack of protection for women in music.
When Sawayama released her debut album in 2020, she was often compared to white pop stars. Through collaborations with Lady Gaga and Charli XCX these comparisons seemed inevitable but also microaggressive. Sawayam’s work is more transgressive than many of her peers and that is largely because of how much works against her. At 30 years old, she was one of the oldest pop stars to release a first album.. But she is also an Asian woman, and aside from K-Pop, the industry – and its fans – largely overlook work by Asian musicians. At the time of her debut, Sawayam was one of the only mainstream Asian female musicians.
Sawayama, who is Japanese and British, has contemporaries in Asian Americans, but many, like her, are overlooked. In 2017, music critic Isha Aran wrote about the disconnect between Americans’ love for Asian-made music, such as K-Pop, and the isolation Asian American artists feel. K-Pop, Aran wrote, is not benefitting independent Asian artists, such as Sawayama. “In fact, in some ways it’s inadvertently undermining it,” Aran observed. “As K-pop becomes more successful in the U.S., there is a chance that it will define what ‘Asian music’ sounds like in America, which will only box Asian Americans in even more.”
A year after Arana’s article was published, Sawayama gained enough traction to be interviewed for the New York Times where she bristled at comparisons to white female artists. “I’ve found in music that people — and especially with emerging artists — talk about us in terms of comparisons,” she said. “Like, ‘She’s the next Britney Spears.’ But there really are no popular Asian artists. So, who am I the next of? Because I’m not the next Britney or Adele. I’m just myself.”
On her second album “Hold the Girl”, Sawyama opens with “Minor Feelings”, a reckoning of identity that mirrored the book of the same title by Cathy Park Hong. In an essay titled “Stand Up” Hong defines the term as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”
Minor feelings occur, for example, when you hear a racist remark and after pushing back, your perception is questioned. “You are told, ‘Things are so much better,’ while you think, Things are the same. You are told, ‘Asian Americans are so successful,’ while you feel like a failure,” Hong explains.
“Hold The Girl” burns with as much fury as it does hope. On “Catch Me in the Air '', Sawayama writes from the perspective of her mother before Sawayam’s birth. But the album reaches its emotional apex with three songs that crackle with a mixture of grief and rage: “Forgiveness”, “Your Age” and “Imagining”. Those songs were partly written about the abuse she endured at seventeen years old. “I was groomed,” she told BBC in September 2023. “It was by a school teacher.”
Throughout her performances and in promotional interviews, Sawayama pushed back pointedly at an industry that didn’t want to listen to her. At Lollapalooza, her performance was the most angry and cathartic show I had ever experienced live. But as she took shots at bigotry and sexism, I wondered who was listening. Mostly, I noticed, the white men distracted by their beers and phones.
Sawayama is hopeful that a new reckoning will come to the music industry. The burden, though, should not be on women to share their stories. It is on media publications, like this one, and men, like myself, to amplify these stories. These, she said, should be published far past International Women’s Day.
But that week, Sayama announced that she would gladly speak to any woman who had stories they needed to share or to men in the industry who wanted to help her advocate for change. XTIE, one of the few Asian female producers and singer-songwriters in music, was one artist who spoke with the singer.
“Rina has been a guiding light. I never saw a role model who looked like me and was able to thrive in the music industry,” XTIE told me this week. “I feel more grounded as a producer/artist/songwriter as I know one day I might possibly be a guiding light to other aspiring artists out there who may be in high school/college. And I believe there will be more women's voices in music who contribute to shaping the culture.”
XTIE told me that it was extremely “difficult” to read the Independent piece. “It was sad to see many women in this industry had to go through this experience,” she said, adding, “It kinda burst my bubble. It was a bit scary as I have no idea what is waiting for me as my career progresses.
Sawayama’s solution for this is to create more access and safe spaces for female, non-binary and trans musicians. To do this, she asked her followers for recommendations of organizations that support womxn musicians and spent the following 48 hours culling through hundreds of DMs. The organizations are listed below:
Ladies Music Pub which supporting women, nonbinary and trans people in the music industry
Esea Sisters, an organization that foster a space for East and South East Asian women, non-binary and genderqueer folk
She Said So is a global community of music industry professionals and artists
The Black Music Coalition whose goal is eradicating structural racism.
Decolonise Fest is a DIY festival that celebrates punx of color
First Timers Fests, which tackles a lack of diversity in the DIY music industry
For now, Sawayama says, she does not feel safe to record music or release another album. “I feel really trapped and I don’t know what to do,” she said when the article was published. Until that is possible, men need to speak up and start to change the system. This problem cannot entirely be on women like Sawayama, who has already put the entirety of her career at risk by speaking out.
“This is our workplace and women don’t deserve to be treated like this,” Sawayama said. “This is not some rite of passage and this needs to stop.”
