“Just Google ‘Chinese Crested,’” Doja Cat says, instructing me to find an image of the dog of her dreams. “They look like they’re 90 from age two weeks. They’re like old people,” she says with endearing wonder. I’ve been talking to the superstar-in-the-making for a few hours now, with the 26-year-old rapper and singer zooming from her Buenos Aires hotel. Her camera has been off, but that inimitable gravelly Southern California tone of hers has been coming through loud and clear. Massive crowds will be gathering that night for Doja’s first stop on her Lollapalooza South American headlining tour—which, when later streamed on Twitch, will show a swell of 100,000-plus fans singing along to her monster hit, “Get Into It (Yuh),” and Doja, in black distressed-denim pants lined with liquid pink spandex, banging out a drum solo intro to her fan-favorite jam “Tia Tamera.”
While our conversation has flowed easily between the Grammys, touring, and the success of her 2021 album Planet Her, she’s particularly excited to speak about this “really, really ugly dog that’s dope.” She hopes to make one her own after completing the 18-city After Hours Til Dawn tour with the Weeknd this summer. “Honestly, that is it,” she tells me. “I want to finish this tour up, kill it, and see my fans happy. And then I want to start writing again. I’m going to finish this next album, and then I’m going to get the fuck out for a second. I want to disappear for a little bit and just do things like wear slides and go to the farmers market. I don’t give a shit about vegetables, but how fun! And I want a dog, too. It’s fucked up that I don’t have a dog. It’s not fair. I want to take care of a dog. I want to raise it and run around in the grass and touch it.” (She may get the chance to unwind sooner than she’d hoped: On Friday, Doja announced that she was canceling her summer festival appearances and her tour with the Weeknd due to tonsil surgery and recovery. “I feel horrible about this but can’t wait for this to heal and get back to making music and create an experience for y’all,” she said.)
Naturally I’m intrigued, and when I type her desired breed into the search engine, I let out a knowing laugh at the image results. Of course. The hairless doggo, often deemed the “world’s ugliest,” is an odd little fellow—half cat, half potato, with puffy tufts on its paws that Doja likens to “hairy boots.” “I think it’s beautiful,” Doja coos, and I believe her. Such a creature would not only be the perfect foray into dog ownership for the bona fide cat lover (if her stage name didn’t tip you off, she owns two cats and wants two or three more), it’s also so damn meme-worthy—a canine primed to go viral, as many of the things in Doja’s fun, frenetic, bonkers world often do.
Anyone who has been following the career of Doja Cat—née Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini—from her SoundCloud days, when she recorded tracks in the solitude of her mother’s closet, to her current Billboard chart domination, knows she is masterful at turning the absurd into a sensation. Whether she’s digging into a cheeseburger and twerking against a green screen made from bedsheets in her bedroom in “Mooo!,” her 2018 viral hit dedicated to cows (“Got steak, ho? Got cheese? / Grade A, ho, not lean”), or accepting her MTV VMA for Best Collaboration dressed in a wormlike Thom Browne cocoon gown, or performing a freestyle rap homage to Taco Bell’s Mexican pizza on TikTok, she loves to bring together disparate references to see what kind of beautiful, irreverent mess they create. Earlier in our call, she recalls a Jay-Z interview that spoke to her ethos: “He was talking about irony in rap, and that is just such a key element. When you take something that isn’t supposed to be what people perceive as rap and mix it in, it creates something new and inspiring. I love the irony.”
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There is plenty of play on meta in the universe the rapper has created on Planet Her, an album filled with earworms that, as the title suggests, invites us into Doja’s world. She shape-shifts in videos set in a far-off galaxy, bending physical form, space, and musical genres—from hip-hop, Afrobeats, and frothy, high-femme pop to heartstring-pulling ballads. “I play with genres that I’m not really used to, and I’m inspired by things that are new to me,” she says. “That’s the game of it all.” If her 2019 album, Hot Pink, kept quarantined audiences entertained with a TikTok-ready dance beat, then Planet Her became the unofficial soundtrack for a “vaxxed and waxed” summer of 2021, debuting at number one on the Top R&B Albums Billboard chart and continuing to chart a year later.
Still, what’s exciting to note about Doja’s work is that for all her recent commercial success, she’s a creative loose cannon. “Doja’s her own little weird video game–playing introverted skateboarder chick from Southern California,” says Brett Alan Nelson, her creative director. “But she comes from a ballet background; she can pop and lock—there are just so many things this girl can do.” Doja says she’ll go to her team and say, “I want to be a lobster, or a pumpkin.” Or “Let’s make me into a giant or an alien.” Or “I want to be a spider today,” and then her team gets to work on the metamorphosis. “We go at it sort of in the way that a Barbie can be anything,” she adds.
The disrupter started out as a music- obsessed kid of a white artist-designer mother and a Black South African dancer- performer father. Raised by her mom, Doja spent her formative years at an ashram in California before moving to the greater Los Angeles suburb of Oak Park as a preteen, where she took up surfing, skateboarding, music, and dance. The predominantly white neighborhood was alienating for the girl of color with a mind and style of her own. Doja remembers being reprimanded in middle school for coming to school in colorful, attention-grabbing themed ensembles, complete with tutus. One day her look was Harajuku; the next it was pirate- inspired. The administrator wasn’t having it. “He was like, ‘Get that crap off of your face. Nobody wants to see that. Why do you dress like this? What’s the point of dressing like this? You’re such a distraction,’” she says. “I never liked the way I looked. I didn’t feel like I fit in. I felt like I stuck out all the time, and I didn’t like it,” she says. “It was a strange time.”
She later dropped out of high school and began dedicating most of her time to recording music, developing a small but loyal community on SoundCloud. Doja’s homegrown single “So High” would come to the attention of Dr. Luke at Kemosabe Records, where she signed a record deal in 2014 at age 17. I remember hearing the underground hit that same year, and both loving her sound and being intrigued by her stage name, which is inspired by her love for cats and a particular strain of weed. I also remember feeling relief that maybe music was finally making space for someone as elastic as Doja—a young Black woman with a range of references and talents, who could rock out to heavy metal and hard rap, and speak to the layered experience of Black womanhood. Fast-forward years later to Doja reinventing “Say So” across a myriad of award show stages: It was freeing to see a Black woman given the license to morph into a Fosse Broadway starlet or a Courtney Love–esque rock band front woman. When I mention this to Doja, she agrees: “It means a lot to me in the sense that I didn’t have that either. And if nobody could be that girl for me, then I might as well be that girl for someone else.”
Doja brings that same sense of play to her emerging fashion persona, serving polished effervescence with a splash of the parodic. Like the time she wore a plunging avant-garde Carolina Herrera gown to walk the red carpet at the 2022 Billboard Women in Music awards: She could barely move in the sculptural design, and there’s a hilarious video of her trotting to the venue with the aid of her team. Normani, who presented Doja with the Powerhouse Award that night, told me, “Doja is a force of nature and a true inspiration to so many. She works so hard and truly loves what she does, and that shines through in her music, her performances, and everything she does.”
Just as Doja can command a stage, she can command the internet. Tens of thousands of followers tune in to watch her silently apply makeup while listening to music, or give her signature bug-eyed gaze at an LOL comment, or even blow off steam with an unscripted Twitter tirade on how she’s overworked. Raw and diaristic in nature, Doja’s IG Lives and TikTok videos are portals into corners of her life, with rapt fans constantly trying to follow the bread crumbs. When she claimed in an Instagram caption, “Dua Lipa is trapped in my basement,” fans became convinced she was collaborating with the “Levitating” pop star. But Doja laughs and assures me it was just her goofing off. “It’s not a clue. I just thought it would be funny. And it made sense because I did the two blonde streaks in the front of my hair and I kept calling myself Dua Lipa that day.”
In other words: There is no strategy—Doja just likes being observed. “I put a lot of things out there about myself. I’m just constantly on live,” she says. “Sometimes I look at myself and I’m like, Well, if you could just fucking turn off your phone for, like, five minutes….” But she thrives on the direct contact with her fans. “When I’m getting creative in any way, I like to see what people think of it. I’ll be like, ‘Should I do this hat or that hat?’ Or ‘We’re going to do a ’90s- inspired makeup thing today.’ Or ‘My wig is falling off the front of my face. Do you want to watch me reapply it?’” It’s reminiscent of her Periscope days as a teen, where Doja would spend upwards of 10 hours at a time making beats. “Now I just go online and scream at people, and that’s kind of a fun hobby for me,” she deadpans.
It has served her well. Dubbed the “unofficial voice of TikTok,” Doja used the platform as a launching pad for Hot Pink’s “Say So” record-making success, while “Streets” went viral thanks to the #SilhouetteChallenge. But her life as a Very Online Person has also proven controversial. As much as she is a child of the internet, it is also often her foil. With Doja having lived half her life online as a music-obsessed gamer, her blunders don’t just go away. Keeping track of the many fires she’s caused is difficult, but high level: In 2018, people called her out for a homophobic tweet she wrote in 2015. In 2020, just as “Say So” hit fever pitch, her questionable behavior in online chat rooms surfaced, including using a racial slur. Doja apologized each time, taking responsibility for her missteps. In a 2020 apology, she wrote, “I want to address what’s been happening on Twitter. I’ve used public chat rooms to socialize since I was a child. I shouldn’t have been on some of those chat room sites, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations. I’m sorry to everyone that I offended. I’m a Black woman. Half of my family is Black from South Africa and I’m very proud of where I come from.”
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The internet doesn’t forget—but then, in a way, it does. Doja has bounced back from near-cancellation thanks not only to the ephemeral nature of social media, but perhaps also due to the sheer strength of her work. When I ask Doja for her takeaway from these various social media controversies, she says, “I just turn off my phone. I delete things and reopen them when I’m ready. That’s kind of how that works for me.”
It’s sometimes obvious she’s figuring it all out in real time. As I was writing this piece, disappointed Paraguayan fans, unable to catch the performer due to stormy weather, began trolling her on Twitter, claiming she hadn’t shown the country any love. The deluge of comments proved too much for Doja, and shortly after midnight on March 25, she announced she was quitting music, changing her username on Twitter to “i quit.” Later that same day, she posted a video of herself singing Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” comically off-key while getting her makeup done. No context, just the caption, “im bouta bust.” She would go on to put on a rousing performance that night in Brazil, despite updating her Twitter handle to “i quit still.” (The next day, she tweeted out an apology, dispelling the notion that she was quitting.)
To over intellectualize the outburst would be futile, because that’s just Doja. She’s unapologetically herself, especially when it comes to the concept of celebrity. In a now famous TikTok, she asked fans, “Can you guys help me? Because I’m a little confused. I don’t know how to [be a celebrity]. Like, what do I do? Can you give me advice on how I should be a celebrity? What do celebrities do?” Doja chuckles when I bring this up, saying the video was prompted by a conversation with a friend around the facade of fame and the pressure to uphold it. “There are these people on TikTok who say over and over, ‘Oh, she forgot she’s a celebrity.’ Or like, ‘I can’t believe you’re famous.’”
If she needed reminding she is big-time, there were those eight Grammy nominations, which took even her aback. “That was insane to me. When they told me how many, I was like, ‘No, no way.’” At last year’s socially distanced ceremony, Doja walked the red carpet in a custom Roberto Cavalli cream-and-chartreuse feathered gown, and later took the stage for a gripping EDM performance of “Say So,” wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier latex robocat costume. She felt great about it (“Despite the latex, it was very, very fun,” she says), but experienced a bit of a comedown afterward. “That was actually the first show that I cried after,” she says. “I definitely felt the emotions. I was so happy to be doing it.”
At this year’s show, she was equally emotional, giving an instantly iconic acceptance speech after she and SZA won for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for their collaboration, “Kiss Me More.” After an ill-timed bathroom break just as her category was being called, Doja had to run across Las Vegas’s MGM Grand Garden Arena to join SZA onstage. Panting, Doja confessed to the audience, “I have never taken such a fast piss in my whole life!”—then adjusted her thigh-high embellished Versace gown. But after the laughter and shock subsided, she broke down in tears, the weight of the moment clearly hitting her. “I like to downplay a lot of shit…but it’s a big deal.”
Among the Grammys she was up for this year, her collab with Saweetie, “Best Friend,” was in the running for Best Rap Song, a contentious category that can embroil hip-hop heads in debates over what qualifies as rap. And while Doja agrees with the purists that no one outside the rap world can judge it (“The only person who should be rating hip-hop is an OG or somebody who is respected in hip-hop,” she says), a future win in the category would mean “everything” to her. “When I was little, that’s kind of all I listened to,” she says. Raised on Busta Rhymes and Lauryn Hill, Doja is a rapper at her core—and says her “real fans” know that she raps. “I’ve rapped since the beginning, and I really couldn’t even sing that well to begin with—I got a lot better,” she says. “I use my voice as a tool to create these worlds, and it’s fine if people think that I can’t rap.”
She’ll have plenty of opportunity to prove the haters wrong on her next album, which she tells me will be predominantly rap. “I haven’t started just because of all the rehearsal and touring. I’ve got a lot going on, but it’s coming up,” she assures me. “I have been getting songs and things sent to me…. Oh fuck, I wish I could tell people! There’s some really cool stuff that I got sent from friends. They’re all working on beats, and I’m giving them notes and they know what I want, so I’m excited.” The album, whenever it comes, will be an exciting entry in this era of young female rappers, many of whom Doja has already collaborated with, including City Girls, Rico Nasty, and Saweetie. “There’s an explosion of amazing female rap talent out there right now,” Doja says. “It’s so cool to see that, because we didn’t have that when we were younger.”
Amid this renaissance, Doja still looks to her North Star, Nicki Minaj, as a source of inspiration. Beyond thanking the queen of rap on “Get Into It (Yuh),” she’s learning how to channel the “lioness fierceness” and creative hustle she’s long admired. “I think her as a businesswoman really inspired me,” Doja says. “The way Nicki can carry herself felt almost alien to me, because I was kind of a little runty kid, trapped in her room, just watching YouTube videos. And back then I was like, ‘Damn, that’s dope.’” Doja has started to build her own business empire, closing deals with Pepsi, Taco Bell, and Eek! Games, putting her own Doja-fied spin on every partnership. However goofball the ads get, she is serious about expanding her business ventures, most likely in fashion or beauty. But she tells me she would have to take some time off to do it. “It’s just not realistic and it’s not fun, to be honest, when you have to rush through things. So that is something I definitely want to do, but I want to do it only. So I would take a break from music.”
But she’s not going the Rihanna route yet. At the time of our interview, Doja’s Coachella 2022 performance is looming, the high-profile return of the mega music festival. The goal is to both wow the audience and leave them wanting more. “I want people to watch our show and escape into a world, but end with like, ‘What the fuck was that? We have to come back next week,’” creative director Nelson says. The idea is Salvador Dalí surrealism in the desert meets Metropolis meets brutalism meets gamers—which is to say, the biggest trip of your life. Nelson’s task is to construct a 35-foot half-inflatable woman reminiscent of Metropolis’s robot and a deconstructed spiral staircase with a ribbon lift. “I wanted it to feel like something that you smoke weed and you go to and you have an amazing time watching,” Doja says. “I didn’t want to give just something that was expected. It’s going to be like you’re falling into a painting.”
The performance will showcase Doja’s grasp of the cinematic. When I ask her about acting, her response is immediate: “I’d love to act. I’d love to be in movies. That’s a massive want for me.” Her first foray into Hollywood is on the soundtrack for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, covering the original Big Mama Thornton version of “Hound Dog.” As Luhrmann worked to translate the music of Elvis’s time for a modern era, he knew Doja had to be a part of it. “Every now and then an artist comes along that you can’t quite put in a category. When that happens, my creative antenna gets heightened,” Luhrmann says.
With her comedic timing, it’s no surprise Doja wants to try comedy, too. “My one hidden passion is stand-up,” she says. “I get nervous just like anyone else, but it feels like it could be a natural, fun thing to do.” In the meantime, she’d like to showcase her comedy chops by going on Ziwe Fumudoh’s no-holds-barred Showtime variety show. “Ziwe is so fucking funny and she’s so smart and I love her so much,” Doja says. “She usually likes to bait people into shit, and it just would be funny to see her bait me.”
It’s the kind of thing that is sure to get Doja trending again, as she so often does. Maybe she’ll say the right thing—or the wrong thing—but one thing is for sure: Whatever comes out of her mouth will be 100 percent her. “There’s no formula to win, but I think there’s a formula to lose,” Doja says. “If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, people aren’t stupid—they’re going to pick up on that real quick. You just have to believe in yourself. It really sounds like some shit out of The SpongeBob Movie, but it’s true.”
Hair by Nikki Nelms for Maui Moisture; Makeup by Raisa Flowers at e.d.m.a; Manicure by Chaun Legend at The Only Agency; Set Design by Daniel Horowitz at Jones Mgmt; Produced by William B. Galusha.
This article appears in the June/July 2022 issue of ELLE.
