On Doja Cat’s fourth album, Scarlet, she delights in enjoying the “demon” her haters and followers accuse her of being.
Illustration by Jackie Lay
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Illustration by Jackie Lay
On Doja Cat’s fourth album, Scarlet, she delights in enjoying the “demon” her haters and followers accuse her of being.
Illustration by Jackie Lay
Do your self a favor and Amazon One Click on your self a duplicate of The Satan Finds Work, James Baldwin’s trenchant 1976 e-book size essay of movie criticism. I am keen on the part when Baldwin skewers William Friedkin’s 1972 horror traditional The Exorcist, thumbing his nostril up on the movie’s banal, phony tackle demonic possession. Baldwin’s level: any conscientious particular person will know that actual evil has nothing to do with the movie’s levitating beds and pea soup vomit particular results. Evil has extra to do with what the movie can not, and won’t say, about racial terror in a rustic that values the immateriality of shares and bonds over the materiality of human life. “He who has been handled because the satan,” Baldwin cuts to the chase, “acknowledges the satan after they meet.”
MC, singer-songwriter and edgelord Doja Cat acknowledges the satan, and he or she’s fiendishly rapping about it on her fourth studio album Scarlet, her most artistically adventurous up to now. Some backstory is critical. Doja Cat first rocketed to viral success with “Mooo!” an absurdist 2018 Soundcloud trifle wherein she rapped from the angle of a cow. Extremely media savvy, Doja Cat put forth a persona, at her profession outset, that was precisely what you’d anticipate from a musician who first linked with followers as an Web meme: equal elements foolish, irreverent and bratty. 2019’s Scorching Pink remodeled Doja Cat into an overground sensation, a brash shapeshifter serving up hip-hop, pop, R&B in equal measures — the Dr. Luke co-penned nu-disco bop, “Say So,” grew to become her greatest hit.
However for a pop star who appeared to just about dwell on-line, and who sees each alternative to be within the public eye as a possibility to make a viral splash, she additionally appeared decidedly uncomfortable with the extra intrusive points of fame. In March 2022, after a canceled Paraguay live performance, she publicly claimed she was quitting music after followers complained. In August 2022, Doja Cat shaved her head and eyebrows, claiming she by no means favored having hair; she referred to as it an act of ripping “off her shell.” Doja Cat’s baldness unleashed the ire of Web “reply guys” and misogynists of all genders who did not hesitate to share their unsolicited disdain together with her look. Followers and haters alike have armchair identified Doja Cat as having psychological well being points and an consuming dysfunction; they’ve diminished her rap expertise, branding her as a sellout on account of her mainstream pop success; they usually’ve referred to as her the whole lot from an Illuminati member to a satan worshiper.
In January 2023, Doja Cat sported an all-red, jewelry-encrusted Schiaparelli look throughout Paris Trend Week that a few of her followers swiftly labeled “demonic”; in April she acquired a tattoo of a mythological monster, additional proof to a few of her conspiratorial followers that she’d Robert Johnson-ed her soul to the satan. She later defined it was a picture from Fortunio Liceti’s work 1616 De Monstris that she discovered lovely even when her followers didn’t, with the accompanying textual content: “your concern just isn’t my drawback.”
However Doja Cat is not solely a sufferer on this story of on-line hostility. A impolite gyal to her core, Doja Cat has lengthy been a social media addict and a bellicose troll. “If someone desires to combat me on the web,” she’s mentioned. “I’ll gladly take part, balls to the wall. It is enjoyable for me.” Exhausted by calls to look conventionally female after shaving her head bald, Doja Cat fired again caustic retorts to her followers on-line, refusing to undergo their calls for. Final month, Doja Cat instructed her fan base (who name themselves her “kittenz”) to get a job and rethink their lives, inflicting a wave of deactivated fan accounts and a spate of calls for that she apologize. As an alternative, she replied on Meta’s Threads: “I do not even know y’all.” Not precisely a mannequin of artist-to-fan graciousness.
Her impulsive want to out-troll her trolls (“I like to go to f****** warfare with trolls,” she gleefully admits) is each disturbing and hilarious. In January of this 12 months, when on-line followers drew consideration to her lack of eyelashes as a part of the aforementioned Paris Trend Week look, Doja Cat tweeted: “If lashes are what you all need, then lashes are what you may get.” For her follow-up look on the Viktor & Rolf Spring/Summer season 2023 Haute Couture present, she wore pretend facial hair, together with excessive eyelashes pasted to her eyebrows. Stunts like these are why Doja Cat deserves an honorary doctorate from the Drake Faculty of Pettiness Research. “I am evil. I am a imply particular person,” Doja Cat not too long ago confessed to an interviewer, perhaps solely half jokingly.
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Regardless of — or perhaps due to — her willingness to wage warfare on her public, Doja Cat has remained a fixture on the Scorching 100 chart, profitable a 2022 finest pop duo Grammy for “Kiss Me Extra” that includes SZA. Of late, Doja Cat has additionally been badmouthing her again catalog, calling her earlier three albums transactional “money grabs,” and labeling her personal recorded rap verses “mid and corny.” Her willingness to self-cannibalize her catalog appears extra like a intelligent approach to promote her newest product than real self-sabotage. Simply final 12 months, Doja livestreamed her course of of manufacturing beats within the studio: it was a nifty approach to share her creativity with followers, but in addition, it appears, to defend her inventive advantage in opposition to naysayers.
Scarlet largely is sensible as Doja Cat’s artistic resynthesis of all her swirling drama and toxicity. “I let all that get to my head,” she confess-raps in Scarlet’s “Paint the City Purple.” The album usually appears like she’s pondering out loud, understanding her points in actual time. As an example, final December, Doja Cat logged on to Instagram Stay whereas having an emotional freakout over the invention of a spider in her home. Two twin spiders seem on Scarlet‘s album cowl, meant to indicate Doja Cat’s overcoming of concern — and to ship a message that she not cares about satisfying her followers. Scarlet‘s lead single, the aptly-titled “Consideration,” is hypnotic, ’90s trip-hop (suppose Large Assault) meets 2000s, alt hip-hop (suppose Black Star). The sound is a pointy left flip away from Doja’s Cat extra melodic, neo-disco and Afrobeat hits — horny, ominous and menacing. It is method nearer to the ’90s indie pugilism of Jean Grae than the 2020s bubbliness of her Scorching 100 chart mates like Dua Lipa and Lizzo. It is also an try and clapback in opposition to trolls who trashed her seems to be and diminished her as a second-rate Nicki Minaj. “Misplaced a lil’ weight, however I ain’t by no means misplaced a tushy,” she raps, later telling followers who say she’s “ugly” that she “ain’t unhappy you will not f*** with me.”
The album title Scarlet evokes histories of biblical harlots and put-upon intercourse employees, to not point out literary characters like Hester Prynne and Wanda Maximoff “The Scarlet Witch” from Marvel comics and franchises. “I am yellin’ 666” Doja Cat blurts out in her abrasive screed “FTG (F*** the Women).” In “Paint the City Purple,” the occult references are in all places: “I am a demon, Lord,” she says; then there’s the self-aware hook “Mm, she the satan / She a foul lil’ b****, she a insurgent.” The video, incorporating work by Doja Cat herself, options the whole lot from crimson pentagrams to photographs of the singer cozying as much as the Grim Reaper. The title of Scarlet‘s third, anthemic single “Demons,” speaks for itself; within the video she wears horns and lengthy, claw-like fingernails. Doja Cat’s been cosplaying her personal Scarlet alter ego — showing in promo supplies half bare, slathered from head to toe in crimson paint that doubles for blood. The look is giving equal elements Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s Carrie, South Park‘s Lucifer and Dianne Ladd’s crimson lipstick smeared, psycho mother in David Lynch’s Wild at Coronary heart.
Doja Cat is trend-chasing, too, with these Satanic references: occult pictures in pop have turn out to be considerably de rigueur after Lil Nas X climbed the charts pole dancing with Lucifer within the video for 2021’s “Montero (Name Me By Your Identify),” whereas Sam Smith and Kim Petras adopted go well with with their video for 2022’s chart-topper “Unholy.” A long time after the “Satanic Panic” when political pundits like Tipper Gore fought to censor pop music by the use of the Mother and father Music Useful resource Heart, Satanism appears like one of many final taboos left for pop provocateurs in an period when even your grandma may need an OnlyFans account. Satanic pop additionally carries an much more transgressive goal in 2023: it rankles and pushes again in opposition to the evangelical Christian proper at a time wherein politicians and lawmakers are permitting the church and state to do the horizontal mambo as a substitute of upholding their constitutionally mandated separation. With the devil-may-care visuals of Scarlet, Doja Cat desires to turn out to be the poisonous monster many within the political institution possible already suppose she is.
However quite a lot of tracks on Scarlet are merely Doja Cat being Doja Cat: selfish, flossing and boasting in a defensive method. “I do not store anymore as a result of I get free garments / You’ll be able to have a trophy, I not want these,” she says on the addictive, brazenly-titled rumpshaker “Moist Vagina.” The sensual “Cannot Wait” has jazz parts and a sampled beat cribbed from “Impeach the President.” Hazy, intoxicating tracks like “Gun” and “Shutcho” fall someplace between vibey neo-soul and blunted chillwave, whereas “Agora Hills” — named after the California neighborhood wherein Doja spent a part of her childhood — is a quilted, romantic R&B sleeper constructed on a pattern of Troop’s “All I Do Is Consider You” that reveals her softie aspect; it is her “Plastic Off the Couch” second.
The album’s manufacturing lurches between boom-bap hip-hop, booty-shaking entice, gauzy R&B and extra, by no means resting in a single model or the opposite. Doja Cat co-directs a few of her music movies, designs her personal art work, and has a writing credit score on each Scarlet track, however her controversial collaborator Dr. Luke (she’s signed to his label and he had a hand in co-writing a few of her greatest previous hits) is nowhere to be discovered. Not the whole lot on Scarlet sticks — a number of of the tracks fail to convey something new to the desk; and at nearly an hour in size, some even handed enhancing may need been so as. Then again, not getting it good could also be Doja Cat’s final anti-pop rejection of the meticulous, my-album-has-no-filler ethos related to perfectionist pop stars from Michael Jackson to Beyoncé.
Nonetheless, Scarlet offers Doja Cat ample alternative to showcase her depraved vocal expertise. “I focus most on my craft / I keep on high of my s*** however y’all carried out acquired me satisfied / That I am the popularist / That is why you watchin my strikes,” she says on “F*** the Women (FTG).” On “Ouchies,” Doja Cat’s staccato supply resembles Roxanne Shanté’s hypersyllabic circulation. And on “Paint the City Purple,” Doja Cat deploys monorhyme, every line ending on a constant syllable stress: “My sickness do not include no treatment / I’m a lot enjoyable with out Hennessy / They only need my love and my power / You’ll be able to’t speak no s*** with out penalties / Bitch, I am in yo’ s*** should you ship for me.” Like her foremost inventive affect Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat’s lyricism is exact and blunt, and he or she gravitates to droll, ribald humor. Scarlet arrives in a golden period for ladies in hip-hop, however not each artist arising lately has the identical potential to rap skillfully. In distinction, Doja Cat’s artistry is rooted in her cosmopolitan listening habits — in making Scarlet, she claims to have been listening to the whole lot from Machine Woman and Orbital, to the Beastie Boys and Cocteau Twins.
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Scarlet’s visible aesthetic, and the malevolent imagery Doja Cat has performed with on-line, additionally reminds us — if solely not directly, by default — that true evil in 2023 has little to do with synthetic crimson physique paint and prosthetic horns. As an alternative, the satan continues to search out idle arms on social media apps, spurred on by the likes of Elon Musk and his insidious re-engineering of Twitter as X — the chaotic modifications he wrought resulted in an uptick on the app in hate speech in opposition to folks of shade below the poisonous smokescreen of anti-woke rhetoric. Doja Cat named her fourth single “Balut” after a preferred Filipino fertilized egg road dish that she crudely (and controversially) mischaracterized as a hen being eaten alive; she says the track is a metaphor for Twitter stans (the previous emblem was a blue hen) and the dismantling of Twitter below Musk’s rule. “F** what they heard, I do not f*** with them birds,” she additionally confirms on the observe “Agora Hills.” Criticizing the rebarbative on-line hatred that X has helped spawn this 12 months, Doja Cat appears to be giving the satan a style of his personal fentanyl.
“How my demons look / now that my pockets full?” Doja Cat shouts in “Demons.” She’s the quintessential 2020s pop star who finds her highlight at midnight swamp of on-line vitriol, who sources her energy from diving deep into the abyss of hatred and arising the opposite aspect swinging. She not solely acknowledges the satan — she meets him with extra sinister and monstrous imagery than he himself may conjure, and in the end bashes him over the pinnacle with reminders of her deep pockets. Whereas many musicians react negatively to their fame as soon as they’ve had a style of it, Doja Cat is not in any respect fame adversarial. “I mentioned what I mentioned / I would somewhat be well-known as a substitute,” she muses in “Paint the City Purple.” Doja Cat is not essentially trolling her haters as a result of she’s some type of ethical crusader; she’s trolling them as a result of pettiness in 2023 interprets to streaming numbers and sold-out arenas. Doja Cat calls her Scarlet-era hijinks a type of liberation: “I’ve all the liberty on this planet,” she not too long ago instructed an interviewer. If there is a hell under, to riff on a phrase from Curtis Mayfield, Doja Cat would be the first to greet us all there.
