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.’”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nytimes.com ’
