Switched on Pop - ICYMI Rina Sawayama Reimagines the 00s

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

One of our favorites artists right now is Rina Sawayama. She works with her producer Clarence Clarity to make this mash up of sounds from the late 90s and early aughts. She in particular recasts Max Martin pop and Nu Metal — too styles that rarely converged — to make compelling songs with a strong anti-consumerist message. I spoke with Rina Sawayama last summer about her debut eponymous album Sawayama and she shared with me the stories behind her songs XS and STFU. We're rebroadcasting our interview with her from last summer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. One of my favorite artists right now is Rina Sawayama. She works with her producer Clarence Clarity to make this mashup of sounds from the late 90s and early aughts, in particular recasting Max Martin pop with new metal, two styles that don't usually converge. And she makes these very compelling songs with a strong, anti-consumerous message.

I spoke with Rina Sawayama last summer about her debut eponymous album, Sawayama, and she shared with me the stories behind her songs X-S and STFU. Yes, the F stands for what you think it does in case you've got kiddos around. Here's my chat with Rina. Over the past couple of weeks, I've really been enjoying this album, Sawayama, by the artist Rina Sawayama. She works with her producing partner, Clarence Clarity, to make this very postmodern mashup of all of the different sounds that were happening in the late 90s and early aughts.

And she in particular recasts the sound of new metal in really creative and fun ways. I recently gave her a ring to talk about two of my personal favorite songs, STFU and XS. Hey, Rina, thanks for chatting with me. Let's just jump right into your music. What is going on with the multiple sounds in STFU? I really liked the sort of duality of the intensity of the intro and the verse. And then suddenly breaking down to something very sweet with like, you know, like sweeping chimes and piano and whatever. Honestly, like I wasn't like, yeah, let's write in like an angry song.

It just flowed. And yeah, I guess that's sort of the mystery of songwriting is sometimes just sit there and scratch your head for hours and, you know, have the worst day ever thinking like you can't write anything. and then another day you'll just come out with something that obviously your heart wanted to write it forever, but you have no idea how it sort of came out. You talk about this duality of these really heavy sounds and these much lighter sounds. What does it mean for you to reference those really heavy riffs?

I guess production is always such a good vehicle for the melody to be heard and to be enhanced as much as possible. And so when I heard that, I wanted to do something that was kind of evanescence, I guess, when I was like, I don't know how old I was, but when I was young, yeah, like, Evanescence was number one for like ages. And then we had tattoo and this pop that had a really heavy backdrop to it. I think it's really interesting when you're able to, like, hold together a song that is, like, so different in certain parts and give it, like, a really strong personality that's not too referential and actually does something new or says something new. That was, yeah, sort of like my goal for this song. Yeah, I'm catching a real new metal vibe.

How do you feel about that association with the genre? Yeah, I guess I kind of love it and it cracks me up. Because new metal, you know, it was like, I guess like a blend of like heavy metal pop and rap and rock. It's like quite chaotic if you think about it. But yeah, I love referencing that. But then adding an element of like maybe Jojo, circa 2003. and sort of making our own because new metal, I don't think, was very cool. But it was dominating the charts.

I think me and Clarence in general like to reference things that are sort of in hindsight quite deeply uncool and try and make it something cool. The new metal era that you're referencing was quite self-serious. And you have a way of approaching songwriting, which feels both from a place of intuition drawing on your influences, but also with a great deal of fun. Is your use of those sounds any kind of reclamation of that earlier work? Is it a way of recontextualizing music that had a very different intent? Yeah, that's a good question. I think especially with metal, it's very masculine, it's very, yeah, it's very serious.

I've always found metal really funny. And I guess there is some satire to it, you know, like, I hope that metal fans find it funny, because I find it really funny. It's often quite performative. Yeah, I mean, the performance of it and just like, just the chaos of it. You have this wonderful moment about halfway through the song where you have this totally evil maniacal laugh that turns into a melody. Can you tell me about that moment?

It literally just kind of came out of me. In the same way that, like, the hook of STFU, like, came out. I remember being like to Claren's like, what if I went? So why don't you just sit down and shut the fuck up? Shut the fuck. And I was like, that's so ridiculous. And he laughed at it. And I was like, yeah, that means we should put it in.

And I think anything that sort of, you know, makes you laugh should be in a song. This seems to be another real juxtaposition between the original aesthetics of new metal, which were quite self-serious, focusing on a lot of anger, pent-up anger, frustration. And here laughter, almost parody seems to be the goal. Yeah, for sure. The whole record for me is like a parody of, and I don't, I'm like, I want to say parody in the sense that like drag makes a parody out of very serious issues. And I'm really inspired by like drag in that sense. And sort of making light of heavy things or making light of a musical movement. And yeah, even though we've, we went in really hard on this record just in general and was very serious about getting it done, I hope people do feel like a. sense of tongue and cheek and the way that we've sort of pulled together all these different references and definitely references that people don't necessarily think are cool. One of my favorite satires is the song, XS.

Can you tell me about how this song came about? Yeah, so the XS, I guess, as the title suggests. I mean, you've got to start to think that it's about something about being small, but I'm talking about and mocking sort of the excessive consumption culture that we have whilst sort of making it sound like a flex song and cardiacea Tesla X's Calabasas I deserve it. Call me crazy.

Call me selfish. I'm the bad. And a lot of people have commented being like, yeah, I love this song. It's like a flex song. And I can imagine it. Imagine listening to it with my, you know, like in my convertible, in my Mercedes or whatever, my Tesla. But that's sort of what I'm mocking.

And that appears as sort of like that every full bar, there's like this metal riff and like the sort of injection of chaos that comes in. And that is meant to throw people off in like the best way possible, but then also keep them in the song as well. And so that was really fun to mix, actually, just to sort of push the boundaries of like, what is too metal? And what is too jarring and then what is just just jarring enough.

And I think we've struck the balance. But even in the lyrics as well, it's sort of a song that, you know, plays around and pretends that it's talking about one thing, but it's talking about another. And I love songs like that where there's like depth and sort of replay value. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Arrera. A fragrance intense with character Gourman and addictive. Imagine a jasmine

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for susentia Excess is as you point out a criticism of consumer culture how do you square

working in the world of pop music which is so celebrity and consumer focused with this satire

Yeah I guess I'm definitely mocking myself because I'm probably in one of the most or more consumptive or over-consuming industries and it's definitely not good and I kind of wrote that song while I was in a serious climate grief because the only sort of way

to move forward was to, for me, make fun of it. Not make fun of like, you know, where the world's headed but it's just make fun of like human behaviour around and the responses to the fact that global warming is accelerating and I used to get very angry at things and I still definitely get very angry at things but the emotion that quickly follows it for me to sort of digest it is to make it funny well it is much more palatable I think as a listener to hear a song which you know it's it's not a song that's

hey you're a climate denier and I hate you it's caked in this larger as you as you pointed out sort of flex kind of trope which makes it at first very listenable And then you spend one moment thinking about it, like, oh, wow, this is pretty profound. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I love playing like that. I think that's such like the sort of beauty of songwriting is that you can sort of take the listener on a journey. However you want to, really. And this whole record for me was like so fun to write in that sense.

And sort of even when I was writing excess with, you know, Nate Campany and Kyle Shearer, like they work along, you know, Carly Ray Jep. and stuff and AliX and they're sort of very much based in LA and I just finished STFU and I was like I need this I don't want to write a song that's going to be before this or after this

on the record so it sort of needs to have similar elements but not be too similar and I remember showing it to them and they were like laughing and I said why don't we have like crazy metal stabs like every four bars and make it super obnoxious but then the rest of it's pussycat dolls

and they just thought I was crazy but It's one of those things that you just got to keep working on it and that song took different revisions but at the end I'm really happy with how it sounds. It's all about like making your collaborators like have fun with the song and also pushing and pulling and making sure you're getting like the best song possible rather than being like too egotistical about it or you know the producer getting too hung up on how they think a pop song should sound and I know that all of them really enjoy writing this so that makes me really happy as a songwriter. You know, I'm not just like sort of turning out any old crap.

Yeah. Well, you're mashing up these two very different, very commercial musics from the height of the CD era. You have the new metal style of guitar stabs that come and sort of inject that moment of, okay, maybe this isn't just parody, maybe something serious is happening here. But the underlying material feels like it must be nodding to some specific kinds of music from the turn of the millennial era. What are some of those musicals? references you're making? Well, I feel like the charts were so chaotic in 2000s, which I really love. Even in the UK, I think it was like reality TV and reality music shows were coming about. So yeah, like the charts were really crazy. So yeah, I mean, you'd have, I don't want to say I was inspired

by Limp Bizkit, but you know, that was number one. Like Rowland was like number one for ages. Then it was like Evanescence, then you had tattoo. And then you had like the era of like Neptunes and Timberland were all over the charts. Justin Timberlake and Sierra and N-E-R-D and that was definitely my favorite era of pop. It was also the period which was the height of Britney Spears and it feels like Excess has a nod to some of her music. Is that intentional? Well, 100%. I'm always inspired by Brittany. She was like my girl. It was Britney first and it was Kylie, then it was Beyonce. But Britney was my absolute everything. And only when I started writing

songs where I realized, like how good the songwriting was. And my first EP, Rina, was very much inspired by the Max Martin style productions. And I sort of shied away from it a little bit in the album, but I still can't help but be inspired by her. And she actually, she is the reason why all the pop singers sound the way they do now, you know, like she set the blueprint for how female singers I expected to sing. And I definitely pandered to that for excess. How would you describe that quality? I always say like a really like demented baby vibe, which I don't really like, I don't know. I liked it for that song. I always adjust my voice depending on what song it is. Like,

I sang Who's Gonna Save You Now, which is like a later track and it's very much stadium rock vibe. Like I sang that like as as though I'm a rock singer and sort of really making the high It's quite shrill and quite unpleasant in a way because that's how male rock singers sing and get up to that high note. But then XS is very much like referential to Brittany and Pussy Cat dolls and sort of the very, very sweet, top end heavy way of singing that's really become the staple for music now. The song feels almost like an extension of Give Me More by Britney Spears. I love that. Thank you. Biggest compliment ever. What is the sample at the beginning of XS? Oh, it's called Miyo, and it's a Japanese sort of old Japanese way of singing.

It sounds almost like Indian, you know, but it's actually sort of like this, I don't even know what it is. It's almost like the Japanese equivalent of like yodeling, maybe. And it's a very, very traditional way of singing. If you watch like any kabuki shows, that's kind of how I sing. Yeah. And yeah, that's the sample. In that way, because of it, it's sort of the downgraded quality of it, it reminded me a little bit of the opening of Toxic in that way.

Oh my God, thank you. See, I can't help myself. I just can't help but put Brittany samples in there. And honestly, like, whenever you see any songs that are doing really well in the charts or, like, any iconic songs, they're just, like, I think people don't realize that they're just such, like, good songs. Obviously, there's the marketing and everything like that and the video. and everything and that's what makes it iconic. But at the core of it, it's just an incredible, incredibly written song.

And yeah, that's sort of what I always try and strive for. But it's sort of that blend of simplicity and complexity. That's really hard to pinpoint in pop. I think it was just the music that I grew up listening to. And now sort of in hindsight. And also, I think it's the fact that, you know, people back then and all the music back then is now, like, would be so cancelled and, like, would never happen again because it would just get cancelled.

For what kind of reasons? Tattoo, for example, you know, would not happen. I think, like, the Britney and Madonna kiss would just be, like, very questionable. I think there's some things that were, like, very much a product of, like, the 2000s and the late 90s.

That, yeah, like, I don't know if, like, the Britney Spears, like, any of those videos when she was really, really young, would happen again now. They all seem ripe for reimagining and in a new context. I feel like excess really does that. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I don't know. I guess like I'm trying to make something that might not ever happen again, sort of a bit more appropriate for the current era.

Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this interview. Take care. Bye. Switched on Pop is produced by Bridget Armstrong, Megan Lumen, Nate Sloan, and me Charlie Harding. edited and engineered by Brandon McFarland, social media by Abby Barr, and illustrations by Arras Gottlieb. Our executive producers are Ms. Kelly Nelson and Nashok Kerwa, who are a part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Reach out to us at Switched On Pop. We love hearing from you.

What other new metal revivalists are you listening to? Also in our show notes, I'm going to post the punk rock MBA video on what killed new metal. It's really interesting. I highly recommend it. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Until then, thanks for listening.