Rina Sawayama - 'Hold the Girl'

Mothering herself in the mother lake that's mother yes mother

Rina Sawayama fundamentally doesn’t understand pop music.

You would think we’d all learned our lesson in the fallout from Beyonce’s tide-shifting Lemonade, her “political” album that sent the entire genre into a messy tailspin for the subsequent four years. “Becky with the good hair” gave way to Lady GaGa penning Black Lives Matter ballads (“Angel down, angel down / But the people just stood around” Nice!) and Katy Perry doing away with her fundamental forever-25 appeal to make “purposeful pop.” (It could be argued that the Witness haircut was the final nail in the coffin for pop music’s chart popularity.) 

Fun and games, dancing and drinking, lusting and longing– the lifeblood of a pop song– completely vanished. As a result, the music made in this window was so awful, so irredeemably abysmal, that almost overnight everybody hated pop music. For most, it’s always been shallow, and it’s always been empty calories, but it’s never been cringe. 

Rina Sawayama is cringe!

What Gaga and Katy didn’t understand about Lemonade was that while it had political undertones, it was still fundamentally catchy and clubby music. The “good hair” line is on the same song in which Beyonce implores her man to “suck on her balls” over stuttering hip-hop production du jour. It sent up stereotypes of blackness and black relationship dynamics, but maintained an essential “cool” that allowed for that exploration. Beyonce danced on top of a submerged cop car in the “Formation” video, but on the radio, she slayed. All day. She slayed. All day. 

Meanwhile, Katy Perry’s “Chained to the Rhythm” music video featured a theme park called “Oblivia” which served cotton candy in the shape of a nuclear mushroom cloud (powerful stuff). The song itself expected to launch to #1 on the strength of lyrics like “so comfortable we’re living in a bubble / So comfortable we cannot see the trouble.” Seeing the disconnect?

Rina Sawayama doesn’t!

Her sophomore album, Hold the Girl, a follow-up to a glossy debut that launched her into indie pop’s upper echelons, is the album Meghan Trainor would make if she went to grad school for gender and women’s studies. Despite being peddled as an album reckoning with the traumas of her past, it’s blunted, saccharine, drab and lifeless. It’s like Rina took a thesaurus to Katy Perry’s “Firework” and blew her own mind with the results. The melodies are dated; not nostalgic. The lyrics are trite; not universal. The vocals are nondescript; not easy to sing along to. 

Rina certainly has the look down. On the album cover, she’s a high-fashion butt plug, cocooned and swaddled bald, styled with mutant-length acrylics. The visuals for her songs are sleek and high-concept, and her time spent as a model lends her a unique brooding glare that bodes well on camera. For this, if nothing else, she’s a compelling figure and a great (hypothetical) fit for pop stardom. 

But historically, she’s struggled to cope with the material realities of pursuing that stardom. It’s no coincidence that her best song, “XS,” is a song that sells shopaholic fantasy by accident. She alleges that it’s “anticapitalist” and meant to make the listener question their carbon footprint, but the song works because of how fun it is to sexily whisper “excess, excess, excess.” The song’s narrator growling that she wants “more, more, more” doesn’t come across evil– it seems really fun.

“This Hell,” the album’s lead single, similarly wants to have its cake and eat it too: “Flame red, caught the moment, posing for the paparazzi / Fuck what they did to Britney, to Lady Di', and Whitney.” The pop ambition of the song is clear, boasting a sickly-sweet hook, but the lyrics hold the reward she’s chasing in contempt.

Hold the Girl is, by and large, her attempt at circumnavigating the bad morals she perceives in pop music. Instead of selling designer bags and sex parties, she’s selling self-improvement. 

Rina would like for us to believe that this is a new or fresh approach; that the “All About That Bass” era of give-no-fucks empowerment jams never happened and never sucked. But Katy Perry did indeed “Roar,” and we did endure Rachel Platten's “Fight Song” as a society. We’ll never forget.

She nearly gets away with it. There’s something about her approach to songwriting and vocal delivery that just seems deep, or smarter than it really is. But even a brief survey of the lyrics on its most bombastically produced cuts is a humiliating experience for an adult. (From the stinker “Phantom”: “If I could talk to you / I'd tell you not to rush, you're good enough / You don't have to lose what makes you you / Still got some growing to do”). 

The album closer “To Be Alive” is most guilty of this. In it, “flowers still look pretty when they’re dying.” And get this: “Blue skies” (wait for it) “are always there behind the rain.”

This sort of vapid therapy-speak haunts the entire tracklist, and ultimately damns the full project. The language Rina uses to process her own trauma, like actual therapy, is anesthetizing and sterile, removing any possibility for actual honesty. It’s distractingly puerile. 

There are no brutal revelations of the self on Hold the Girl. There are no admissions of guilt, there are no personal shortcomings, no portrait of an actual person. In fact, more often than not, the album’s narrative is addressed to a disembodied “You”. Supposedly this is Rina playing mother to herself, but on record, it sounds like preaching.

What’s worse is that often in the delivery of these lyrics, Rina’s voice is flat, faceless, and devoid of character. It’s a weak amalgamation of the Britney/Gwen affect, and any number of the label-limbo randos who sing the soaring hooks on EDM radio hits. Certain lyrics would be forgivable if delivered with some more personality and gusto. Instead, much of the record washes over like the Selling Sunset soundtrack: vaguely girly, sassy pump-up jams sung by a stock character.

The production choices are sound, though mostly safe and inoffensive. “Imagining” offers some of the most adventurous sounds on the album, and the most dynamic vocal performance from Rina. Anchored by a heady and dark dance beat and free of unlistenable lyrics, it’s by far the album’s most successful track. This won’t be a surprise, but it’s also by far the most danceable, the catchiest, and the most unintelligible in terms of message. Elsewhere, styles veer from twangy country-lite to tepid UK garage retreads. Serviceable, but few showstoppers.

“Send My Love to John,” a stripped-back acoustic ballad, is also a redeemable highlight. Rina’s vocal performance on the track is a godsend– after an album full of unremarkable singing, it serves as a beacon for her talent. She can sing, she does have gravitas if channeled correctly. It’s just a shame that this time around it’s weaponized for Netflix-original-movie bait.

For all of the triumphant posturing on Hold the Girl, the vast bulk of the tracklist sounds like fear. Fear of getting too close to the truth of oneself, fear of not being liked by the right people, fear of getting messy, fear of putting anything at risk. 

The theater director Anne Bogart once wrote that “if your work does not sufficiently embarrass you, then very likely no one will be touched by it.” Rina couldn’t possibly be embarrassed by Hold the Girl– it’s a huge held breath, a pompous refusal to let anything too wild loose. As a result, it’s an embarrassing album.

★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

RINA SAWAYAMA
HOLD THE GIRL
September 18 2022
(Dirty Hit)