Karaoke in the Dark: Rina Sawayama’s Eighties Fantasy

Her parents moved her from Japan to London when she was a child—for work, for love, for the usual reasons parents rearrange children’s geographies without asking—and she spent her days watching anime and playing Super Nintendo and listening to music that didn’t quite fit anything happening around her. Which is to say: she and I would have gotten along. That specific combination of obsessions, the import cartoons and Japanese gaming hardware and slightly wrong record collection, is the kind of childhood that either produces a person of genuine taste or someone deeply annoying at parties. In Rina Sawayama’s case it produced both, and I mean that entirely as a compliment.

She’s been making music for a few years now, moving between electronic and pop with a consistency of character that most artists can’t maintain. The self-titled debut had songs like Cyber Stockholm Syndrome and Tunnel Vision that found her a cult following without ever cracking through to anything larger—but cults are more durable than trends, and her people stayed.

The new song, Ordinary Superstar, is an unambiguous love letter to the eighties—specifically the dark, glittering, slightly excessive eighties of Japanese television and European club culture smashed together into something that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. The video, directed by Can Evgin and styled by Nicola Formichetti, has her dancing with friends through low light and sequins, and at some point she leans into a microphone and does karaoke with the kind of theatrical commitment that only makes sense if you grew up treating it as a serious art form. She did. You can tell. She moved from Japan to London at an age when identity is still being formed, and she formed it around exactly the right things—and the video is proof you can’t really leave where you came from. You just learn to dress it up and take it dancing.