If you can be anyone on the internet, then who can you be in music? Amala Dlamini, known publicly as Doja Cat, is intent on letting her audience know that that choice is up to her. They’ve seen her dressed as a cow, covered head to toe in red crystals or covered in fake blood. They’ve danced to her sexy pop hits and bobbed their heads rhythmically to her bars. They’ve fawned over, gawked at, unfollowed, idolised, repeat—such is the tricky game of fame. Doja’s public persona contains the complex multitudes of her music: bubbly and sometimes dark, joyous and overwhelmingly angry, and, as fellow musician, friend, and interlocutor Jack Harlow puts it, “palatable and infectious.” To amend the initial question: If you can be anyone, what does that mean when so much of your perception is controlled by a public you’ve never met?
The answer lies in the Grammy award-winning artist’s track record: Doja Cat, Billboard’s Top Female R&B Artist of 2021 and 2022, XXL’s Performer of the Year and Female Rapper of the Year of 2022, and this year, she became the first female rapper to ever headline Coachella. So, when you look at Scarlet—the album inspired by a red-tinged alter ego of the same name whose love, passion, and anger knows no bounds—
Doja Cat emerges a raw talent whose concepts not only carry lasting power, but sentimental impact. On Scarlet, she reminds audiences of her many facets: she doesn’t care about the front-facing demands of fame on (“Attention”); she’s proud of her “Holly-weird bag” (“Shutcho”); her body of work comes from firm roots within (“Paint The Town Red.”) And this is the real message of fame Doja Cat stands on, that no matter what she does or how people react, her art cannot belong to audiences just because it means something to them. Harlow concurs.
When Doja Cat joins the Zoom, her screen name reads “a tiny little horse,” and it’s rather expected in that it’s unexpected. In an exclusive conversation for Present Space, Harlow joins Doja Cat: to discuss everything from how fame, aspiration, and even the power of Instagram feed curation contribute to her inner self.
I think it happens typically when I’m writing the music. Sometimes I feel like I used to use a lot of filler in my lyrics, now not as much. But I think that I rely on the way things sound, just sonically, and less about the meaning. That’s kind of always been how I write, it’s not meaningless, but it’s more about the sound of the music and less of the lyrical gymnastics of it all, which comes with rap, you know. I think sometimes it gets competitive, and I don’t really sway in that direction. That can allow me to feel maybe insecure. But for the most part, I really love what I’m doing at the moment.
I think that comes with age and experience. Being transparent, I think I wasn’t comfortable not writing filler when I was younger, and as I aged, I felt more comfortable opening up and being honest, reflecting on things that are a little more poetic and meaningful to me.
Not necessarily, I think I’m just more excited about whatever the future holds for me, because I know I have more experiences to write about. My growth makes me feel more secure about the things that I’m planning to write. I do still want to keep it tongue in cheek and fun. I think sometimes when you get personal about things that maybe even bother you, oftentimes, people either can’t connect because they’re such specific situations, or they really connect in an intense way because it’s so specific. I think when you write very simple things—partying is a big one, because partying is something people enjoy—it’s like you’re giving someone a place to escape into, like a fantasy book. People really want to read that book or listen to that song that makes them feel like they’re at a party. I want to still keep that energy and that spirit, but I want to keep it interesting too. I don’t want to keep regurgitating the same thing over and over.
Scarlet is a very, to put it simply, quite an angry project. And I think the point of that album was to showcase anger and how it processes through my mind, but also it’s about coming to your own defence and love. It’s also a massive deal to me that I was able to reflect on love and what love means to me, whether it be towards another person or myself. SCARLET the character represents vulnerability, but also the colour red. It’s sort of my “Why I oughta!” moment [laughs] of squaring up with everyone and defending myself, telling myself that I’m here for me, and not just for everybody else’s enjoyment.
There are certain things that I cared about in the beginning of my career, and I think a lot of it was trying to find a path where I’m independent, and I’m able to support myself. With that, I made choices to make music that I really loved and enjoyed in the moment, but maybe didn’t want to push myself to do different genres that I knew weren’t necessarily marketable. I feel okay with that because it’s what I needed in that moment, I think that was a comfortable space for me. And I was so young!
I really love jazz music, and I love neo soul, and different kinds of rock music and indie and experimental music. That stuff tends to get pushed to the side by the general populace, and I didn’t see it in the past for me, so I did the thing that I knew would stick. Now, I feel like I can take those elements that I have from the music that sticks and put it into this soup of different genres that I really love and enjoy and respect, and make something new with it. That’s what I’ve always loved to do, is swirl a lot of different sounds together, but really in the future, I want to start going in a different direction sonically that isn’t supposed to just protect my pockets necessarily, and isn’t just supposed to woo the younger fans or the people who only want to hear sexual themes or self-medication or stuff like that. There’s so much to life and it’s been a pattern of writing about those things for me, but now I want to stretch the canvas.
I think I try to balance between two different things: I like to be understated, but I have this need to be a little campy and a little crazy when it comes to fashion. A lot of these opportunities that I get to express myself publicly with fashion, I take them and I try to do something that feels like a performance piece, something that can inspire. It’s been really fun to build a catalogue and do those things, but it’s fucking exhausting. In my personal life, I like to wear things that are more understated with a little bit of a twist to them. And then it’s just a lot of up and down with my choices. It’s been fun! I do kind of wish I could just have a uniform that I wear everyday so I don’t have to think about anything. It’s not easy, sometimes getting dressed in the morning.
Yeah, I think that as people, we are not ready, or not fully prepared, or fully evolved, as far as the internet. So when we see things on the internet, there’s things that we think we’re in control of, that we’re not in control of. And when we see people having a good time, but we’re bed rotting, not having the best day, and we scroll and see something that’s not an artistic expression, but somebody doing something we wish we were doing, I think that we don’t take into account what that does to our brains. Me personally, I feel those feelings of “why isn’t that me right now,” or those negative, low vibrational thoughts. I know that I just shouldn’t follow people who aren’t going to be creative, because that’s more mentally stimulating to me in a positive way, to follow people who are creating something new. It’s a safe haven for me as opposed to a place where I am watching people either pretend to be happy or genuinely be happy. I don’t want to use my phone in order to witness people’s happiness which I’d rather experience in reality.
You know, I had really, really good friends who fought for me and I think that the ambition came from them in a really big way. I had the wherewithal to some extent to allow this career path [to blossom] without being afraid of it, that was good for me. But I think that the real legs of it were the people that were around me. I always had the natural drive to want to make music, and I think that from the outside looking in, the lifestyle of somebody who is a public person can look scary, and it is in some cases. But I don’t think that my drive has changed. I still want to make music, but I’ve made a lot less. Because of the things that come with making the music: you’ve got to go to award shows, you’ve got to make appearances and do other projects that aren’t necessarily the musical ones. I think back then I was making a lot more music because that’s just what I needed to do in order to solidify a stable career. I think I still have that in me, and I’m still hungry.
