#doja cat

dojasource:

DOJA CAT photographed by Jacob Webster

Doja Cat’s studio albums are claimed by the lesbians!

(requested by @abbacchiwo thank you!)

DojaCat:lol

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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 CAT wearing Alexandre Vauthier via Instagram