From Billboard No. 1 to winning her first Grammy, Doja Cat is on her way to rise.
Doja Cat almost missed her first Grammy award when she was seen hurrying on stage after a fast bathroom stop. She shared the prize with SZA for their smash hit “Kiss Me More.”
On Sunday night, when presenter Avril Lavigne announced the duo’s victory, the camera switched to SZA, who was seen slowly making her way to the stage due to an injury she suffered the day before. Lady Gaga was spotted assisting SZA.
However, the cameras were unable to detect Doja Cat. She had exited the event for a restroom break. She was seen rushing through the crowd moments later, with a member of her team carrying the train of her dress, to reach the stage.
SZA came to the stage on crutches to accept the prize, and Lady Gaga assisted her at one point, but she still beat Doja Cat to the microphone. When Doja Cat arrived, she was out of breath and stated, “I have never taken such a fast piss in my whole life,” and adjusted her dress. Later in her speech, she started to cry. “I like to downplay s**t. But this? It’s a big deal.”
Doja Cat running back from the bathroom to accept her #GRAMMYs award with SZA. pic.twitter.com/A7pS5bUKhf
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) April 5, 2022
This year, Doja Cat received eight nominations, including Song of the Year and Record of the Year for “Kiss Me More.” Planet Her received nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, as well as Best Melodic Rap Performance (“Need to Know”) and Best Rap Song for her guest performance on Saweetie’s “Best Friend.”
Doja Cat has been shifting even more of Planet Earth’s people into citizens of Planet Her since 2021. The groundwork has been in place for years, but with Planet Her, Doja has settled herself among the current crop of pop music A-listers. On July 4, the album became Doja’s highest-charting project on the Billboard 200 music charts (No. 2), as well as the best opening-week sales total of her career to date, as well as the highest-grossing day for a female rapper in Spotify history. If conquering the Billboard Hot 100 with “Say So” the previous year wasn’t enough, the enormous success of Planet Her and its hits has indisputably established Doja Cat as one of the definitive pop performers of our century.
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Despite the fact that the general public is just catching up, Doja has shown her star power since “Mooo!” became viral in August of 2018. The wink-and-a-nod novelty tune brilliantly tapped into Gen Z humor’s own style of self-deprecation and complicated webs of internet inside jokes. Doja, like any smart pop star, took advantage of the viral success of “Mooo!” by releasing a deluxe edition of Amala, her debut studio album, in the months following.
While Doja Cat has made a name for herself by capitalising on viral events and amassing a significant fan following, her online history has been marred by accusations of homophobic remarks and her participation in racist chat groups.
While Doja Cat’s career has taken off, she has not always had a clean slate on her path to prominence. Old tweets from the “Say So” singer that used numerous homophobic insults and used them to refer to musicians like Tyler The Creator have reappeared online. She sought to defend herself with a scathing tweet, which only added to the commotion and anger directed at the 25-year-old. Doja Cat then apologised on Twitter from her Notes App after deleting that tweet, but she later erased that apology as well.
The 25-year-old issued a statement before the month’s end, stressing, “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.”
Doja also addressed the tumultuous 2015, writing, As for the old song that’s resurfaced, it was in no way tied to anything outside of my own personal experience,” she wrote. “I made an attempt to flip its meaning, but recognize that it was a bad decision to use the term in my music.”
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Doja’s music has achieved a lot of popularity, but one song in particular has taken internet by storm. Her song “Say So” became a global dancing fad as it took over the famous Generation Z app TikTok. The dance craze started with a TikTok user with the username “@yodelinghalley,” who made up a basic dance to Doja Cat’s “Say So,” which quickly became “one of the most popular dances on the app ever.” This resulted in every major TikTok celebrity performing the dance, as well as millions of other app users.
The SZA-assisted “Kiss Me More,” the breezy disco-tinged opening song that served as the perfect trigger for the Planet Her era, was certainly the appropriate beginning point for Planet Her. The song follows the same sonic and structural design as Doja’s defining hit, “Say So” — she sings for the opening and hook, raps for the first verse, and then sings for the rest of the song. SZA had just had her biggest Hot 100 solo hit of her career (“Good Days”), and Doja had just had the slow-burning success of her previous album’s “Streets,” thus the success of “Kiss Me More” was nearly certain.
According to MRC Data, “Kiss Me More” has already been streamed 378 million times in the United States, proving his prediction correct. The song debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 before peaking at No. 3 and became Doja and SZA’s third Top 10 success.
Doja’s status as a capital-P pop star has been bolstered by high-profile partnerships like these. Planet Her contains a number of A-list pop and R&B artists, including The Weeknd and Ariana Grande, as well as guest rappers Eve, Gunna, and Young Thug. Doja had been utilising these big-ticket collaborations to ascend the ranks of pop success before she appeared on Planet Her — the largest collaboration of Doja’s career had been with Nicki Minaj, whose remix of “Say So” helped propel the song to No. 1, becoming both artists’ first Hot 100 chart-topper.
Doja’s enthusiastic performances are only one aspect of her social media supremacy. Listeners will use her songs to replicate her performance peculiarities, just as they will utilise her songs for every TikTok video notion under the sun. Doja is an interesting and relevant pop artist for this age and period in pop music because of the merging of the new and old school. She’s pop, rap, R&B, and alternative all rolled into one.
Doja Cat is a pop diva who will spend a lot of time posting memes and mocking her followers than sharing links to her new songs and videos. What she’s tapped into isn’t necessarily relatability, but realness; she’s not attempting to build an image to appeal to any certain group; she just lives on the internet as herself, and that’s enough. She utilises social media like a regular person, whether she’s breakdancing to R&B on Instagram live or posting ridiculous Twitter polls in the middle of the day.
Doja is both forward-thinking and eerily familiar at the same time. Doja Cat, a pop diva born in the Internet Age with knowledge of an old-school blueprint that she bends to her whim, is well on her way to becoming the generation’s defining pop star.
