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    Rina Sawayama Wants Her Success To Make Space For Asian Women In Pop Music

    NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Rina Sawayama about her self-titled debut album, everyday racism against Asian women and going from a Cambridge student to a rising pop star.
    by Michel Martin Jul 19, 2020 3 minutes
    On her first album, Rina Sawayama blends metal and pop and tackles serious issues."It was such a risk to be a musician that I didn't want to do fluffy pop songs and hope it cut through," she says.

    Rina Sawayama's self-titled debut album is a complex work of pop music, often calling to mind early 2000s R&B, nu-metal, and shuffling between genres in the same song. In the same way she flips through sounds, Sawayama also sings about a lot of complicated topics: her parents' messy divorce, her identity as Japanese British person and her burgeoning understanding of systemic racism, which she says she experienced while studying psychology, sociology and politics at Cambridge University.

    "It was only in hindsight that I was like

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