Doja Cat doesn’t mince words or need to keep quiet about what she thinks. Her fans know this, but the artist’s latest attack on her own followers, who refer to themselves as kittenz (“kittens”, alluding to the singer’s stage name), seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. “If you call yourself kitten or fucked kittenz, it means that you need to leave your cell phone, get a job and help your parents at home”, he snapped at them. The consequences of this confrontation materialized in the same place where the fight began: on social networks. Following those words, Doja Cat lost more than 500,000 followers (only on Instagram it brings together more than 25 million). Far from giving in, she reaffirmed her words through a brief text published in stories: “Seeing all these people unfollow me makes me feel like I have defeated a great beast that has been holding me back for a long time and I feel like I can reconnect with those who really matter and love me for who I am, not for who I am. what it was… I feel free.”
Born Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini (Los Angeles, 27 years old), her stage name synthesizes the artist’s love for cats and her taste for marijuana, a drug that she currently ensures that she no longer consumes. “I just drink too much” confessed in rolling stones in December 2021. But besides cats and pot, there’s a third element that defined Doja Cat’s years before she was Doja Cat: the internet. Like many digital natives, the Angelina spent her childhood and teenage years surfing the web, captivated by the endless possibilities of social media and entertainment platforms that allowed her to find endless beats and post songs created from scratch in your living room.
That creative restlessness runs in the family. The daughter of a graphic designer, Deborah Sawyer, and South African stage actor and dancer Dumisani Dlamini, she spent her early years in Rye, New York, where her maternal grandmother lived. She never had a relationship with her father. As stated in the magazine rolling stones, in the early 2000s, her mother moved with her and her brother to a commune in the Santa Monica Mountains, Sai Anantam Ashram, a place of spiritual connection built by jazz artist Alice Coltrane in 1980. Surrounded by nature and calm, the environment did not fit with the active character of Doja Cat, who dropped out of school at the age of 16 as a result of her ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), according to what she herself recounted. “My brother liked it. He had many friends. But I didn’t have any. For me it was like: ‘I can’t eat what I want to eat, I can’t really do kid things.’
After a time in the commune, the family moved to Oak Park, a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles. There, Doja Cat had a life far from the norms followed by many children her age. The hours on the internet multiplied without diminishing the creativity of the future singer. During those unfiltered teenage years, she expressed comments in chat rooms that have haunted her for some time afterwards: from homophobic insults to racist expressions from which she has sought to distance herself on several occasions, such as when she claimed in a statement issued in 2020 that she is “a woman black”: “Half of my family is black from South Africa and I am very proud of where I come from”. From polemic to polemic, The New York Times he wondered in a 2022 article Is Doja Cat uncancellable? (Is Doja Cat non-cancelable?).
So far, she has not only dodged each of the controversies in which she has been involved, but has managed to make a prominent place in the music industry without giving up her provocative character. Her career dates back a decade, when producer Yeti Beats —with whom she has worked until her last album released—discovered her thanks to the song so high, released to the internet universe by Doja Cat. Over the years, he has also worked closely with musician and producer Dr. Luke, co-author of many of his greatest hits. The producer’s name grabbed headlines in 2014 after the singer Kesha accused him of rape, a controversy that has also affected Doja Cat, who assures that their professional relationship began before the singer’s accusations against the producer, faced during a decade in a legal battle that was resolved this summer.
The turning point for the artist occurred in 2018 in the most unexpected way. In that year, her first album hit the market, love her, direct reference to his real name. However, that was not what catapulted his career. The artist reached the virality with the theme Mooo! (onomatopoeia of the cow mooing), a song that perfectly synthesizes the sound and aesthetics of Doja Cat: humor, provocation, extravagance and catchy rhythms between pop, hip hop and rap. The chorus was intentionally nonsensical—“Mooo, I’m a cow”—and the video, with visuals typical of the manga, low-res stock photos of farms, and cutaways of Doja Cat dancing while eating a hamburger, milkshake, or some chips, accumulated millions of reproductions (currently it has exceeded 125 million views). plays). The theme was conceived as a “joke”, as the artist has acknowledged, but it worked so that her name would sound beyond the virtual world.
Precisely the Internet had another key role in the development of his professional career. During the pandemic, when a large part of the population took refuge in endless entertainment behind the screens, Doja Cat multiplied its visibility. The topic say soreleased just a few weeks before the confinement and belonging to his second album, Hot Pink, became one of the musical successes of TikTok, where users of the platform contributed to its dissemination by creating a choreography. When in May 2020 he launched the remix of the song with Nicky Minaj, he achieved his first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 list and paved the way for what would come next.
The specialized press defined his third album, Planet Her, as one of the great releases of 2021. The nominations and awards did not wait. The topic Kiss Me More, in collaboration with the singer SZA, broke several music records. Apart from winning the Grammy in the category of best pop duo/group performance at the 2022 gala, the song made history by being the collaboration of women that remained on the Billboard Hot 100 list for the most weeks. In addition, the album was the most played by a female rapper in history on Spotify, according to data provided by the platform last year. As if this were not enough, he ended 2022 with seven songs on the Billboard Hot 100 list, tied only with Bad Bunny.
Turned into one of the artists of the moment and contrary to what it may seem due to her defiant attitude and her lack of filter when expressing certain opinions, Doja Cat feeds her own character, polished in each of her public appearances, where there is no room for chance. Five years after becoming famous thanks to that song in which she sang that she was a cow, she walked down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York dressed as a cat as a guest at the exclusive Met Gala. For her debut at the party, she transformed into a feline thanks to some hyper-realistic and quite disturbing prostheses. The styling, signed by Óscar de la Renta, was a nod to Choupette, the inseparable cat of the designer Karl Lagerfeld, around whom the theme of the gala revolved. His appearance at the Paris haute couture week was also highly commented, when he attended the Schiaparelli show wearing a suit made of 30,000 tiny crystals, distributed and glued along his skull, face and body. When it comes to playing with her image, whether by shaving her head or shaving her eyebrows, the artist underscores that versatility also present in her musical work, difficult to pigeonhole in a single genre.
![Doja Cat at the Met Gala on May 1, in New York.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/YCw-t66g4VcrhmHxa1FGNg_66UQ=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/BTTYY5545ZG5JFIN45HESMB2GE.jpg)
Doja Cat keeps up and shows no signs of getting tired or tiring. In 2023, she has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the year for the magazine Time. On the other hand, he has just announced the release of his new work, Scarletof which two singles have already been released, note and Paint the Town Red, both with direct allusions to the confrontation that he maintains with part of his fans. “It’s stupid, you follow me but you don’t care about the music,” he sings in note. Born provocative and restless by nature, in V Magazine He has expressed the new direction his career will take by ensuring that during these years he has been making “appetizing, commercial, easy-to-sell” music. “It has allowed me to be where I am. Now, I make music that allows me to express the world around me as I feel it”.
At the moment, she is still one of the fashionable artists. Throughout these months, she could swell her list of awards with several MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), including the best artist of the year. In addition to best video of the year, best direction and best art direction for note and better collaboration I Like You (A Happier Song)along with Post Malone.
And be careful, because the musical terrain is starting to become too small for the American. so he confessed this august in Harper’s Bazaar commenting on his interest in delving into “other types of projects”. Among them, fashion and makeup. But, above all, the cinema: “I want to explore acting. I want to make movies that I believe in. I would have to stop a bit with the music. I adore comedies and action movies. I want to learn martial arts and make a movie like john wick [la saga de acción protagonizada por Keanu Reeves]”. Time will tell if he is serious.
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