Flashback Friday: Rina Sawayama - Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys) | The gay anthem that the gays let flop

I’ve always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet over Rina’s 2019 song “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)”, because I always thought that it deserved to be a huge smash hit. All of her singles from Sawayama deserved to be hits. But I have always felt that “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” got the shortest end of the stick out of all of the singles. It seemed to be the song people talked about the least. The original (and far superior) version of the song effectively got replaced by clubs and the RGB (255, 255, 255) gays by the remix with Pabllo Vittar. And it also got THEE WORST music video. A music video so terrible, that I’m not even gonna post it again here. So, we’re gonna highlight one of the Dynasty Tour performance of the song, which gives more of what I expected from the video.

We’re gonna ignore that white girl’s awful catwalk and duckwalk.

“Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” is an outlier on the Sawayama album because of its sound, and it being one of the few cuts on the album to not feature the production of her partner in crime Clarence Clarity. But it was the one song that had the potential to cross over in the biggest way. Even more than a song like “XS”. Its sound was perfect for radio. Perfect for the clubs. Perfect to be flipped by a Ballroom DJ and be spun at vogue function. Perfect for a Comme des Garçons fashion show, not just because of the song title, but also because Rina is Japanese. And yet, the song never managed to catch on anywhere. It’s the only Rina single that I’ve never heard played ONCE when I’ve been out and about. Never heard it on the radio. Never heard it in a club. Never heard it in a store. Nowhere.

Not only was “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” just a flat out great song, but it was also just ahead of trends at the time; before pop music as a whole started to ride this wave of latching onto disco, house and club style records. And then there’s the subject matter of the song; taking a gender based term like ‘I’m that bitch’ and flipping it on its head. “Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” shoulda been a club classic. A gay anthem. A top 10 single. But it never happened, and it’s really unfortunate. But with the way music has changed, the ways in which we consume it, and the new ways in which we can discover it - it’s never too late for a song to find a mass audience. Even if it’s years after it originally released. Something we’ve seen many times over the years, and very recently with the likes of Kate Bush.

“Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys)” also holds the honour of featuring one of the coolest single cover artworks I’d seen in a while.

#JusticeforCommeDesGarconsLikeTheBoys

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💿 Rina reviews: This Hell | Sawayama | Rina
📀 Rina revision: Sawayama (The Random J Pop Revised Expanded Edition)
🗄️ Rina shit: That time Rina performed at Coachella | That time Rina got shafted because of racism and xenophobia | That time Rina met Hikaru Utada | That time Rina released a gay anthem and gave it an awful music video