Doja Cat likes to make things difficult.
That impulse is, in part, a reaction to the fact that so much has seemed to come pretty easily for the Los Angeles rapper and singer as she bloomed into one of the defining pop stars of the 2020s: crowd-pleasing radio smashes, sold-out tours, 19 Grammy nominations and one of the more detailed-obsessed, battle-ready fan bases — known as “kittenz” — in modern music.
To counter the gloss that has coated her commercial sound and career ascent, the Doja Cat way is to always be asking why, with bite and some belligerence. Such flare-ups, often ignited by the artist herself, tend to implicate both Doja and her admirers equally, leaving a crater in the conversation that she must then lift herself out of; some in the blast radius might get left behind, but that’s probably the point.
The songs that brought Doja all of this attention, for example — hits like “Say So,” “Kiss Me More” and “Woman,” from the albums “Hot Pink” and “Planet Her” — were just “cash-grabs and yall fell for it,” she once wrote on social media. “Now i can go disappear somewhere and touch grass with my loved ones on an island while yall weep for mediocre pop.” As for her most engaged supporters? If you identify as a kitten, Doja has suggested, you should probably “get off your phone and get a job.”
A very online 29-year-old technology addict, the musician born Amala Dlamini is trolling, usually — but she means it, too. Trailed since her 2019 breakthrough by a string of these micro-controversies — the bouts of brutal honesty but also her stubborn, subversive allegiance to so-called racial chat rooms and edgelord T-shirt choices — Doja Cat appears to find personal and artistic fuel in sparring, especially when shadowboxing with the mirror.
“I listen to so much good music, and when I do that, I beat myself up and think that my music should be better,” she said behind blackout shades at her home in Calabasas, Calif., in between heated rounds of Fortnite on the big screen. “I remember making all those songs for ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink’ and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”
“I’m doing things that people like,” she thought in recent years, “and I’m glad that they enjoy it. But now, I am going to veer off the edge of the [expletive] cliff, and do whatever I want to do, and listen to my intrusive thoughts,” she added, “in order to make me feel like I’m doing something productive for myself and not just the brand.”
The resulting follow-up album, the rap-heavy “Scarlet” from 2023, was supposed to be a corrective. Darker, more personal and shot through with the defensiveness of an M.C. who was sick of her technical skills being questioned, the album was less successful than the two before it, but still went platinum and delivered a No. 1 single, “Paint the Town Red.” For Doja, even a swerve proved popular.
More crucially, though, “Scarlet” taught Doja Cat that the chip on her shoulder was permanent. “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” she said of her attempt to be taken more seriously. “I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”
And what Doja Cat knows are old-fashioned hits.
On “Vie,” her fifth album, out Sept. 26, the pop star is strutting back into the broadest of tents and hitting a split in a bedazzled leotard. Marrying the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of “cock-rock” glam — think Mötley Crüe, Poison, Kiss, “not that I even really listen to them, necessarily” — songs like “Take Me Dancing” and “Jealous Type,” the album’s lead single, are unabashed and unpretentious, even if they pull from a deeper reference bucket than the sparkly surface lets on.
“It’s overtly sexy and it becomes kind of silly, which is likable and fun,” Doja said. “I just always want to keep that sense of fun, but I never want to be too goofy.” She cited Nina Hagen, the German cabaret-punk throwback, as another inspiration — “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja explained. “She has layers to her.”
Featuring production for the first time by the pop polymath Jack Antonoff, alongside Doja Cat’s go-to lineup of lesser-known studio hitmakers (Y2K, Kurtis McKenzie), “Vie” — French for life — is very much “a continuation of ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink,’” she said. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning. I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”
McKenzie, who has worked on every Doja Cat album, said in an interview that the singer was “definitely battling something” over the last few years that needed purging. “When you do something so effortlessly, sometimes you want to move away from that,” he said.
The recording process for “Vie,” on the other hand, found Doja “more openhearted” when it came to “making music that other people can enjoy, she can enjoy, and it not being so heavy,” McKenzie added, noting that Doja once again wanted to show off her voice and perform the role of pop star. “‘Scarlet’ allowed her to miss that.”
The scale of the singer’s ambitions were clear a decade ago. “She was very, very confident about where she was going,” McKenzie recalled, even when the producer Yeti Beats — who signed Doja Cat to Dr. Luke’s Prescription Songs and Kemosabe label — used to “pick her up from her mom’s house in his Prius” to come make music at their shared studio space. “The vision was to be a huge artist.”
It doesn’t take long around Doja Cat to realize that the anarchic looseness of her online persona, and her self-described “brain-rot humor,” belie a certain ruthlessness. In real life, Amala is to Doja what Tina Fey is to Liz Lemon: the shrewd, exacting string-puller that allows audiences to confuse the character’s mess for its creator’s. You only know the exaggerated quirks, it turns out, because of a type-A master plan.
“Her human design is very supercomputer,” said SZA, who features on the Grammy-winning “Kiss Me More,” from 2021. “She takes data in and recomputes it and outputs it in a Doja filter.”
At home these days, Doja Cat can summon a caffeine-free Coke Zero from her assistant at will, using it to chase a shot of water served “in a wine glass for a hamster” — a creative, diva-fied tactic to address her usual dehydration. She locks in while gaming, placing third in a “zero build” Fortnite battle, but only after involuntarily letting off a string of vulgar put-downs as she kills.
“Now I’m overstimulated, so I’m going to take a break,” Doja said.
Despite doing terribly in school, opting instead to spend more time on the internet, she remains blessed with the petulance of a gifted child. Days after an extended back and forth about her hip-hop bona fides on X, she giddily recounted the exchange she’d had with a random fan, proud of both her consistent logic and having found a place to rattle off her backpack rap heroes (“Busdriver, Aesop Rock, Quasimodo, Doom, the Captain Murphy project, Atmosphere etc”).
“I love to have a good conversation, even when it’s with somebody who I might think is an imbecile,” Doja said, shrugging at the idea of voluntarily rolling around in the digital mud.
“I grew up on the internet and I understand what it is,” she added. “It’s the dirtiest street corner of them all, fluffed to look like a mathematical, manicured, glamorous thing, with perfect pictures everywhere and beautiful fonts.” Still, she added, “If someone walked up to me on the street and said something to me, and I had time, I would answer.”
Raised by a searcher of a single Jewish mother, Doja moved as a child with her and her brother to a predominantly Black ashram run by Alice Coltrane in Agoura, Calif., where she remembers singing transcendental hymns called bhajans. “It was hard because I wanted to be a kid and I didn’t want to garden and I wanted to eat McDonald’s,” Doja said. “But it builds character.” (She is estranged from her father, the South African dancer Dumisani Dlamini.)
The rest of her youth was spent in nearby Oak Park, a “very racist-ass suburban neighborhood.”
She found community on the unruly message boards and public chat rooms of the early aughts — eBaum’s World, Funnyjunk, TinyChat — which inform her black-pilled sensibility to this day. “Me and my friends just make stupid noises all day and do inside jokes,” she said.
But the “petri dish” that birthed Doja Cat also armed her with a natural understanding of these once-underground spaces, whose mores have since oozed into mainstream culture, allowing her an ease with the pop star-as-streamer model long before streamers went mainstream.
It makes sense, then, that she blew up from a meme. Following the release of her debut album, “Amala,” in 2018, Doja released a video for the novelty track “Mooo!” — better known as the “Bitch I’m a cow!” song — performing in front of a D.I.Y. bedroom green screen that featured a bouncing hamburger and anime breasts. From there, the mainstream notice has never ceased.
“She’s the center of the culture by not giving a [expletive] about being the center of the culture,” said Antonoff, who produced on nine of the 15 tracks on “Vie.” “There’s never a conversation of like, ‘Ooh, would this be a good thing to do now?’”
The pair had never met before collaborating on the album, which started as a vague idea about R&B songs — or maybe the intersection between punk and jazz — at Brad Pitt’s Miraval Studios in France near the end of last year.
There, though, Doja hit on a theme lyrically, inspired by the cartoonish version of French romance — “the mustaches with the rose in the mouth,” she said. “I wanted to embody it in sort of a tongue-in-cheek way,” but also earnestly: “As a daughter of a single mother taking care of two kids, romance is something that I feel is my life lesson because it’s not something that was ever really there.”
She has long considered herself a sex writer. “Like that’s my whole thing,” Doja said. “I have floggers and whips all over my walls.” But “Vie” is different, she added, “because I’m talking about not only my own sexuality, but his.” (Having most recently been linked to the actor Joseph Quinn, Doja Cat said she is “just having fun” and “allowing things to happen,” while noting that she both loves men and loves “bullying men.”)
The matching musical palette, Antonoff said, was a side of the ’80s that could be considered the opposite of yacht rock — “you’re not being tasteful,” he explained. “It’s a little bit more in that ‘4 a.m., driving around the dark’ kind of zone.”
For Doja Cat, the choice was as much physical and visual as it was musical. “I know who I am and how I want to perform,” she said — all out and in-your-face. “I wanna move, I wanna dance.” In preparation for bringing the full spectacle of “Vie” to audiences around the world this fall and through next year, she has been working out harder than ever, taking ’80s fitness to the max. “It’s an excuse to look great,” she said.
As for the songs, Doja is “a lot more” forgiving now than she has been of her own music, especially in the recent past. But it’s a process. “Do I wanna listen to it? No, I turn it off still,” she said. “But I can appreciate it.”
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
The post You’ve Got It All Wrong About Doja Cat appeared first on New York Times.
