Doja Cat: Doing What Feels Right

The off-line and online have always been intertwined for Doja Cat. “I must have been really drunk,” she explains, telling me about a time she put out a request to her fans on Instagram Live to bring couscous to her shows. Sure enough, at her next show, several fans arrived with tubs of couscous. “I don't know why I would do this, but I took the couscous and I poured it all over my titties on stage.”

Doja looks off into the distance as she reminisces. “I thought it was the greatest thing ever. But it was like in my eyes and my teeth, and in my mouth, and it was stuck to my lipgloss. It was so slippery,” she exclaims, comparing it to an ice-skating rink. “Then I let people on stage, and it was just a mess,” she continues. “Nobody fell, thank God. I don't know how. I was very lucky. We were all very lucky.”

It’s clear to see the artist’s eccentric online persona – catapulted into the mainstream in 2018 with a viral song about being a cow – has attracted an equally eccentric fan base. One that’s as keen to revere Doja Cat as the ‘Second Coming of female rap’ as they are to gleefully roast her online. One of Doja’s more recent offences was being photographed in a precariously balanced red wig, her edges out in the breeze. The image earned her around 75,000 likes, several hundred disapproving commenters, and one particularly scathing comparison of the wig to a badly placed hijab. When I bring up the incident, her eyes grow wide. “Oh, my God. Dude! When I saw that picture… I wish that my wigs were better, I do!”

Today, Doja’s tresses are waist-length and platinum blonde. And, as far as I can see, quite firmly attached to her scalp. “I needed that picture in my life. I was just like, 'Damn, nobody told me? Nobody saw that?' It was taken after a show in Chicago, when it was really hot, and my wig was just sliding and gliding.”

Doja’s memetastic rise to prominence was an unconventional one, but certainly not an odd tale for our times, in the age of TikTok hits and overnight Instagram fame. Doja Cat, born Amala Dlamini, was primed for her time in the social media spotlight, having already nailed down a recording contract back in 2014, and released a self-titled album just a few months prior to the sprawling success of ‘Mooo!’

This isn’t to say that the track should be chalked up to premeditated marketing – that vein of strategy is simply at odds with how Doja operates creatively: “I can't really help but just write about the first thing that comes to my mind.” She shrugs. “I don't like to think so hard about stuff.”

Despite her devil-may-care approach to songwriting, it’s evident that Doja takes her craft very seriously, particularly as someone with a dedicated online following. “You want to have stans and whatever. You want people to support you, and push your stuff, and believe in you, but I think it's very important to evolve and be the best performer that you can,” she states, adding “at the end of the day, who wants to see someone do a shit song with a shit voice, and who can't perform on stage?” Doja recognises how important a tool the internet is for musicians and artists right now, but adds “you have to build those relationships first in the real world with your fans.” While Doja aims to keep social media at an arm’s length, she is still an active Instagram Live user and indulges in the occasional incendiary tweet. “My boyfriend is a huge Twitter guy, he loves to shitpost and put goofy stuff on there. I say a lot of angry stuff that is just random crap that makes me feel better.” She feels this is a more accurate reflection of her than robotically tweeting “'Hey guys, check out my album, check out my fucking mixtape, like and subscribe, leave a comment.'”

Doja freely admits she is “very roastable,” and not just for the odd wig faux pas. “My outfits tend to look like some sort of video-game character. In the Nardwuar interview they told me I looked like somebody from Street Fighter.”

Doja’s style, she tells me, draws from Japanese Haraujuku aesthetics, as well as industry idols such as Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. The artist’s tendency toward outlandish visuals emerges most acutely in her music videos, which have seen Doja sporting holographic, crystalline bikinis, custom latex fashioned in the style of watermelon, and even sharp, uncanny feline features in the ‘Rules’ video in which she acts as the boss of a ‘cat mafia.’

When performing live though, aesthetics are less of a priority. “I like to expose my chest, and I like my legs out. I try to bring that same sort of colorful, fun, sexy thing to the stage with my outfits, but I tend to just wear little body-pieces, like body-suits on stage. I like to feel free,” she explains.

As she’s developed as a performer, Doja has noticed that she’s less inhibited on stage. “I've made it more of a thing get down on the floor more now than ever. If I like a song more, then I'll perform it better. It's been like that since Hot Pink came out. I kind of have a punk rock thing to my shows now, I get dirty and I don't care if a part of my clothing gets messed up or something. I keep going and I try to enjoy it.”

But Doja wasn’t always so comfortable on stage, especially as a young performer. She recalls her first show as a 17-year old, wearing a bad, itchy wig, a “horrendous” outfit, and “terrible” make-up. “When you're a high kid who's just smoking weed all the time, you think you can dress so well.” She tells me with a laugh. “Or maybe it was just me! But I did this really tiny bar in Echo Park in Los Angeles, like the stage was maybe the size of this table,” she says gesturing at the conference room table in front of us.

“I mean, it was pretty awkward at the beginning, I was a pretty awkward teen,” she continues. “It was just how you would feel if you were 17 and on a stage. Some people, no matter what, are like a god on stage. But it took me a while.”

Public performance may not have come naturally to a young Doja, but it’s a skill she finely honed now; evident in the steadily-increasing acclaim surrounding her and her work. This stardom was, apparently, years in the making. “When I was a kid, my friends and I used to have these talent shows in our living rooms. I had a band for like, four days, when I was 8,” she tells me, “It was really bad, and I don't even know if we had a name. There was a really bad song, and I still remember the lyrics to it, but I'm not going to sing it. You couldn't pay me. Well,” she pauses and reveals a sly smile. “You probably could pay me.”

Interview by Jenna Mahale