Rina Sawayama

Lady Gaga describes Sawayama as an “experimental pop visionary who refuses to play by the rules”.  

 

Rina appeared on the front cover of Billboard magazine’s pride edition in 2021, along with a lengthy profile:  

 

“Her material is often dark and deeply personal, but she wraps each song on Sawayama in the pageantry of pop music. “Rina is a pop-art chameleon,” says friend Elton John, a longtime fan who duetted with her on a new version of “Chosen Family” in April. “Her debut album is a clever and confident kaleidoscopic odyssey that zips and zooms through a compendium of pop music genres. She exuberantly changes gears from track to track and keeps the listener guessing where she’s going to go next.”

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Genre fluidity is essentially the norm today, but Sawayama takes the concept to dizzying new heights: She’s less interested in blending sounds than in pushing each to its extreme…

 

There’s an exhilarating whiplash in hearing her go from “Dynasty,” an Evanescence-inspired rock anthem about intergenerational trauma, to “XS,” a snappy critique of consumerism that evokes Spears’ frothy collaborations with The Neptunes. In less skillful hands, the transition would crumble into mere pastiche. Sawayama’s approach, however, feels reminiscent of code switching, something many queer people — and more specifically, queer people of color — know intimately: the ability to flit between presenting queer and straight, constantly modulating identities depending on circumstances…

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Sawayama traces her sense of theatricality to her days at Cambridge’s Magdalene College, where she studied politics, psychology and sociology while singing in a hip-hop group called Lazy Lion. “I thought we were the second coming of Black Eyed Peas,” she says. “I wasn’t nearly as iconic as Fergie, but I was trying.” At times, however, she struggled. She has called the university culture of Cambridge “horribly patriarchal” and felt isolated and stereotyped as an international student during much of her time there. But in her senior year, she fell in with a group of queer creatives, including the drag band Denim, which gave her a much-needed sense of belonging. Sawayama, who has been open about her experiences with depression, credits that scene with saving her life.”