It’s been seven months since Matty Healy stirred controversy when he made some racist remarks about Ice Spice during an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show in February. In a new feature for Variety, the “Princess Diana” rapper — who remained quiet throughout the incident — spoke out about her thoughts.
“When I had heard that little podcast or whatever, I was so confused,” she told the publication. “Because I heard ‘chubby Chinese lady’ or some s— like that, and I’m like, ‘Huh? What does that even mean?’ First of all, I’m thick. What do you mean Chinese? What? But then they apologized or whatever. And the whole time, I didn’t really care.”
In the Friedland episode, the show’s hosts played a clip of the “Munch” rapper talking about her love of alternative music, including Coldplay and The 1975 from an Elle interview in January. The hosts and Healy then begin speculating on Spice’s ethnicity, with jokes about her sounding like an “Inuit Spice Girl,” a “chubby Chinese lady” and one of them saying, “‘Yeah, I rap and make music’ Do they talk like that? Do Inuits talk like that?” The audio of the podcast then found Healy and the hosts imitating Chinese and Hawaiian accents as they laughed.
After one of the men suggested Healy should have asked about her ethnic background while dropping an Inuit ethnic slur, Healy called Ice Spice “dumb.” The offensive episode was pulled from Apple and Spotify earlier this month but can still be heard on Youtube, and Healy went on to apologize for his comments.
Ice Spice revealed that she has seen seen Healy in person, and The 1975 frontman gave her a personal apology. “I saw him at the Jean Paul Gaultier party a couple days ago, and he was like, ‘Hey, you OK?’ and I’m like, ‘Of course.’ He apologized to me a bunch of times. We’re good,” she said.
