asian girl, so confusing

a comprehensive history of Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama's relationship as a fellow asian girl

I’ve been quiet for too long. I’m sick and tired of white men adding their two cents to the alleged Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama fallout. I say this with love, but please, shut up and let the Asian girls speak on this one.

I’m both Black and Asian so I’ve been doubly offended by the antics of Matty Healy and his friends. I’ve been both a Pixel (Rina Sawayama fan) and an Angel (Charli XCX fan) since 2021 so I’ve been doubly disappointed by their “beef.” I also hate both Matt Healy and Paris Hilton (we’ll get to her role in this, trust me). Since I’m an Asian girl who has been forced to watch these two Asian women clash much to my dismay over the past few years, you’re legally required to listen to me. Neither of them are blameless, but I believe there’s a lot to learn from both their history and their music about how confusing it is to be an Asian girl. I’m taking this opportunity to explore all of that as a fellow Asian girl who also finds this all very confusing. This article is probably going to be all over the place because there’s just too much lore to unpack and too many timelines to jump so walk with me.

At the start of 2022, Charli and Rina collaborated on a re-imagining of September’s “Cry for You” titled “Beg For You.” It was…not their best work, to say the least. However, the fact that these two Asian Brits known for making interesting and underground pop music for the gays were coming together to maximize their joint slay was enough to make it a moment. They shared a cute moment at a Crash release party and smoked under a table at the Brits the following year. It was a fever dream for your local clubbing gay with great music taste. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.

In June 2023, during Rina’s set at Glastonbury, she dedicated her song “STFU!” to Matty Healy, telling the crowd, “I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of these microaggressions. So tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches ‘Ghetto Gangers’ and mocks Asian people on a podcast. He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough!” This callout occurred during the middle of whatever Taylor Swift and Matty Healy were forcing us to witness that summer so it was immediately evident to everyone who came across this performance that she was talking about him. She wasn’t sugarcoating a thing. She was mad as hell, and she made it known on the biggest stage imaginable for a fallout between three interconnected British acts to go down.

Rina previously praised Taylor and cited her as an inspiration for her sophomore album “Hold The Girl.” Bringing up Matty Healy owning her masters (he co-owns record label Dirty Hit and calling out a public figure like him here makes plenty of sense) seemed to be a dig at Taylor for showing hypocrisy when it comes to when she chooses to care about master ownership. Masters are a topic I’m simply not educated on enough to elaborate definitively on, but I can say that I sympathize with Rina here. Obviously, this is a different situation than Taylor’s, but it being a situation in which an Asian woman is mad at a “racist at worst, problematic and questionable at best” man making money from her work doesn’t make it any less valid.

In an International Women’s Day Instagram post last year, Rina wrote, “I’ve been lucky to have found ways to keep my business afloat and support myself as well as my team, but when it comes to new music I can’t release another album under my current conditions. I feel really trapped and don’t know what to do.” In February, Rina posted pictures of her back in the studio with the caption “Maybe music isn’t so bad after all…” This is clearly an ongoing situation, and I’m sure we’ll hear more from Rina’s side about developments as she starts to return to the industry and the public eye.

Charli’s role in this debacle is quite complex as she’s engaged to Matty’s The 1975 bandmate George Daniel. Charli and Rina haven’t been seen together publicly since Rina’s Glastonbury callout, but her social media activity has played a major role in fueling the rumors of their fallout.

In August 2023, two months after Glastonbury, fans noticed Charli had unfollowed Rina on Instagram and cryptically tweeted “messy era.” She then returned to Twitter to post the following:

I’d like to believe Charli when she says they spoke about it and seemingly worked it out, but I’m also not stupid. They haven’t been seen together since, and Rina wasn’t on the BRAT remix album when she would have seemed like a no-brainer before this whole thing went down. In an interview with The Face in February 2024, Charli elaborated on the situation.

I somewhat understand what Charli is saying, but I think it would be remiss not to acknowledge her privilege in this situation as a white-passing wasian (her mother is Gujarati Indian and her father is Scottish). While she might be able to turn a blind eye to the antics of the men her fiancé surrounds himself with, it feels weird for her not to realize that Rina as a Japanese (and queer) woman might not be as willing to do the same. Ethel Cain has expressed regret over signing with Dr. Luke’s record label, so this isn’t as simple as claiming Rina knew what she was getting into. I doubt she signed that deal knowing the ins and outs of Matty Healy’s brain. Labels with weird men behind them clearly enjoy taking advantage of women and LGBTQ+ artists who might not be able to find offers elsewhere.

Of course, it would also be remiss not to mention that Rina isn’t an angel in this situation either. Last Pride, she released a collab with Paris Hilton, and well, I’ve already got a whole article about how much I dislike Paris Hilton. As a staunch defender of Rina up to this point, I was very disappointed. Rina is older than the white women I mentioned in the post. She was 13 when The Simple Life started airing and I am obviously not familiar with how much or how little the British tabloids have covered Paris’ antics over the decades. Excuses aside, Rina and her team should have done their research and not gone through with this collab. It soured a lot of people’s perceptions of Rina and many people were quick to throw away her whole anti-Matty argument aside as a result of it. It was a terrible and embarrassing move on her part that I sincerely hope she reflects on and apologizes for someday. It also wasn’t completely unexpected. In 2022’s “This Hell,” she literally sings, “Wow, that’s hot.”

All this being said, there’s no such thing as a “perfect victim,” and if Rina is distraught about the man who owns part of her masters owning part of her masters, I’m going to believe her. I’m not going to downplay her emotions and take it lightly when she says she feels trapped. I can only hope she’s in a better place mentally now.

Below are a few Charli and Rina tracks from BRAT and SAWAYAMA respectively that I think best encapsulate all that’s confusing about being an Asian girl.

“Dynasty” opens the album as Rina attempts to break the chain of generational trauma and take the reins of her own story.

Mother and father, I know you were raised differently
Fighting about money and his infidelity
(Now it's my time to make things right)
And if I fail, then I am my dynasty

“Apple” can really be about any rocky relationship with a parent and went viral because of a cute TikTok dance, but “Apple” is particularly relatable to me and my own relationship with my immigrant mother. Charli sings, “I wanna grow the apple, keep all the seeds / But I can’t help but get so angry, you don’t listen to me.” Later on the album, Charli vulnerably shares her thoughts on motherhood on “I think about it all the time,” and I think there’s an added layer to this internal conflict when placed in the context of generational trauma which Rina’s “Dynasty” also exists within.

I don’t have a great relationship with my mom. She can’t understand me and I can’t understand her because we come from very different backgrounds. I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want children, but even as a child myself, I feared passing down my mental illness and having just as flawed of a relationship with my own children as my mother has with me.

I recently watched “Postcards from the Edge” written by Carrie Fisher and this quote (while ultimately about the white lead characters) particularly resonated with me: “I don't know your mother, but I'll tell you something. She did it to you and her mother did it to her and back and back and back all the way to Eve and at some point you just say, ‘Fuck it, I start with me.’”

Rina sings about her parent’s role in her depression on “Akasaka Sad” where she realizes that distance alone can’t help her break the chain of inherited mental illness. It follows her everywhere to the point where she starts to accept that she’ll be sad forever, a stark and depressing contrast to the determination she displays in “Dynasty.”

Twenty-eight and I still want to scream
Can't face who I can and can't be
5,938 miles between you
You make me Akasaka sad

“Girl, so confusing” is famously about Lorde as they worked it out on the remix together. What Charli is singing about on the original track is a pretty universal experience for women, but I argue specifically women of color. I felt the same way about plenty of white classmates growing up. We weren’t friends. We didn’t loathe each other. We just existed in the same space and ended up in some confusing middle ground of jealousy and miscommunication because of that. It shouldn’t have to be that way, but that’s what girlhood is and it doesn’t just stop once you hit adulthood. You’re forever that little girl jealous and admiring of the white girls who seem like they have it all but that you’ll never truly understand or know the way you know yourself.

“Paradisin’” sees Rina traveling back to her rebellious childhood of drinking and kissing, much to the dismay of her mother. The production mimics a Japanese arcade game as Rina fires back, “Livin' my best life thrivin' / You say I'm misbehavin' / But I'm just a kid, so save it / Let me have an unforgettable time of my life.”

Both Charli and Rina’s rebellious childhoods have led them to make some pretty incredible music. Most girls regardless of race go through this rebellious phase against their strict mothers, but both women acknowledge how their backgrounds played into their attitude and art. In a GQ interview last year, Charli said, “I had friends, but my school was full of blonde white girls and I was this half-Indian girl with frizzy hair and different interests. That always made me feel a little bit rejected. I thought if I made music, people would think I was interesting…Deep down, one of my biggest fears was being boring. My mum, in particular, was terrified. She grew up in Uganda and never really drank, never smoked a cigarette. She came from a Muslim family where the idea of a 14-year-old going to a rave was completely alien.”

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I went to SWEAT tour last year (and had the time of my life). I own Rina’s albums on every format imaginable. Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama will probably always be two of my favorite artists. That doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been disappointed by both of them and the fact that they’ve let things between them and their fans fall through over the white people they choose to associate with. Whether they work it out on the remix or not is completely up to whether they’re both up to it. However, inside these icons are still two young Asian girls from Britain, and speaking from experience, it really is so confusing sometimes to be an Asian girl.