Rina Sawayama calls out Matty Healy at Glastonbury 2023
Rina Sawayama used her performance at the 2023 Glastonbury Festival to call out Matty Healy, her labelmate at Dirty Hit. The Japanese singer dedicated her song “STFU!” to a white man who owns her masters, mocks Asian people on a podcast and watches “Ghetto Gaggers,” a form of pornography in which white men humiliate and dominate black women. Although Sawayama did not mention Healy by name, her speech was a clear reference to the 1975 frontman’s appearance on “The Adam Friedland Show,” where he was heard laughing as co-hosts Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen made racist and sexist comments.
Healy issued an apology to rapper Ice Spice, who was referred to as an “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady” on the podcast, but dismissed the backlash he received, claiming that nobody actually cared about the controversy. He and Taylor Swift, with whom he had a brief fling, broke up in June.
He’s not part of her “Chosen Family.”
Rina Sawayama called out her Dirty Hit labelmate Matty Healy in the middle of her set at the 2023 Glastonbury Festival in England on Saturday night.
“I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of these microaggressions,” the Japanese singer said onstage before performing “STFU!”
“So tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches ‘Ghetto Gaggers’ and mocks Asian people on a podcast,” she continued.
“He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough!”
While Sawayama, 32, did not name Healy, 34, during her impassioned speech, she was clearly referring to the 1975 frontman’s controversial appearance on “The Adam Friedland Show” in February.
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During the podcast episode, which has since been removed from Apple and Spotify but remains on YouTube, co-hosts Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen called rapper Ice Spice an “Inuit Spice Girl” and a “chubby Chinese lady,” mocked various accents and joked about Healy watching “Ghetto Gaggers,” a type of pornography in which white men humiliate and dominate black women.
While the “Oh Caroline” singer did not make any of the comments himself, he came under fire on social media for laughing during the conversation.
Healy subsequently apologized to Ice Spice, who recently collaborated with his now-ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift on a remix of “Karma,” before dismissing the controversy surrounding him.
“It doesn’t actually matter,” he told 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. If it does, 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.”
Healy and Swift, 33, broke up in June following the backlash he received, though a source told TheFantasyTimes exclusively that their fling was only ever meant to be “a fun, good-time thing that would last as long as it lasted and would be no big deal once it was done.”
