Rina Sawayama has shared her thoughts on Sabrina Carpenter’s Saturday Night Live performance, praising the star but commenting on the performance’s martial arts theme.
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Carpenter performed the song ‘Nobody’s Son’ from her latest album ‘Man’s Best Friend’ on SNL on October 18. The performance had a martial arts theme, with Carpenter herself wearing a short white robe and black belt and dancers acting out a fight sequence.
The singer was making her hosting debut on the long-running show, serving as her own musical guest, and also performed her single ‘Manchild’, made reference to the controversy over the ‘Man’s Best Friend’ album cover, and poked fun at her friend Taylor Swift’s song ‘The Fate Of Ophelia’.
The following day, Sawayama posted a clip of the performance on her Instagram Stories, and wrote, “Big love to Sabrina but fellow artists creative teams … if we are clearly referencing a culture, please can you do so with the research, respect and care it deserves. Shoes on tatami is jail.”
Tatami are soft mats used in traditional Japanese rooms, and etiquette dictates that people shouldn’t wear shoes on them.
Sawayama was born in the Japanese city of Niigata and moved to London with her family when she was five years old. While adjusting to life in the UK, she tried to “preserve” her Japanese culture, in part by listening to Japanese artists, and in 2019 Vogue Japan named her one of its women of the year.
At Glastonbury Festival two years ago, she spoke out against The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, previously a director at her record label Dirty Hit, following a controversial podcast appearance on which he mocked the appearance of rapper Ice Spice and said that he watched a racially charged pornography series.
Introducing her song ‘STFU!’, she said: “I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of microaggressions. So, tonight, this song goes out to a white man who watches [pornography series] Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast. He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.”
She then seemed to call Healy out again during her set at NOS Alive in Portugal a couple of weeks later.
Not long after, former collaborator Charli XCX unfollowed Sawayama, with fans speculating that it was related because Charli was dating, and is now married to, Healy’s bandmate George Daniel.
Charli then addressed the drama on X (Twitter), writing: “Look – this all got a bit crazy – me and Rina spoke about things on the phone just now. My unfollowing (which happened a couple of weeks ago) was over a personal disagreement between friends which we’ve now spoken about.”
In 2024, Sawayama – who released her most recent album ‘Hold The Girl’ in 2022 – said that she couldn’t release her next album “under my current conditions”, admitting: “I feel really trapped and don’t know what to do.”
She told The Independent that, since the previous summer, she had “felt intense racist misogyny in a way that I’ve never felt before,” adding: “In public and private I feel as though I’ve been repeatedly gaslit, disrespected, ignored, even cyber-bullied for calling out blatant racist and sexist behaviour.”