Doja Cat said what she said in new track “Paint The Town Red”
The "Attention" singer is not backing down after continually beefing with her own fanbase
Music Features Doja Cat
Doja Cat is taking an approach recently practiced by both Sam Smith and Lil Nas X. When haters call you the devil or tell you to go to hell, lean in. Hard. The only difference is that in Doja’s case, the reasons have less to do with homophobia and more to do with dating an alleged abuser and being a pretty prolific shitposter, and instead of haters, it’s more like her own fanbase.
The rapper recently got into hot water with her “kittenz” for, among other things, taking shots at the fanbase’s chosen name seemingly out of nowhere. “[My] fans don’t name themselves shit,” she wrote in a since-deleted Threads post. “If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or fucking ‘kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.” Fan-pages have also shut down in recent months over Doja’s choice of partner, a popular Twitch streamer named J. Cyrus who has been accused of manipulating and emotionally abusing members of his team.
Doja hears all of this—and she doesn’t care. “Yeah, bitch, I said what I said / I’d rather be famous instead / I let all that get to my head / I don’t care, I paint the town red,” she raps over a (delightfully chosen) sample of Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By” in the opening of her new track “Paint The Town Red”—the second from her as-of-yet untitled, upcoming fourth album.
The track itself is a reminder of why Doja is so famous in the first place. Her sounds is unique, lush, and 100% in control as she deems herself a “bad little bitch” and a “rebel,” and directly calls out fans who melted down over her shaved head and eyebrows (“Ugh, I look better with no hair”) and pivoting genre (“Said pop make money, now you try bitch / You could use a revamp with a new vibe, sis”).
The video itself is a visual feast, with Doja posing as a Carrie-esque femme fatale, riding a green, horned creature through the sky, dancing with the grim reaper, dressed as the literal devil, and posing with chunks of (human?) meat in turn.
It’s a strong statement from an artist who has never quite known how to navigate the rabid stan culture that’s surrounded her from the beginning: from now on, I’ll do, say, and make whatever I want. It’s a message that’s sure to further alienate fans of her earlier, poppier work, but could also bring in a whole new wave of listeners, eager to witness an interesting, complicated artist at the height of her powers.
40 Comments
Performance art disguised as music, basic bish.
The music industry has a history of chewing up artists like this and spitting them out broken and/or dead. Here’s hoping that’s not how this goes.
I’m old enough to remember when she swore/“joked” she’d retire.:D 😀
This one started out broken before she became famous.
So glad I never bothered finding out who she was or anything about her
All you need to know:She got famous doing fun, goofy raps and then eventually it turned out she was legitimately good.But about the time she was doing fun, goofy raps she was also in alt-right chat rooms throwing around racist stuff about how much she hates black people. (She’s black… let her therapist handle that.)At about that time she was also riding the George Floyd wave and released a song making fun of black men being murdered.But then all of that came out and she denied it ever happening — and then admitted it happened — and then said it was satire and she was reclaiming racism — and then she blamed her PR team for her apology being bad.And then she released a bunch of rap lyrics where she regularly complained about how much she hates black men.EDIT:Okay, I guess this is also relevant but whatever. She exclusively dates white dudes and her latest white boyfriend is a streamer who got caught saying a bunch of racist stuff which made everyone remember that Doja Cat’s a black woman who hates black people. But that boyfriend has been cheating on her, so a segment of the population is experiencing schadenfreude at publicly witnessing a woman who sings about horrible black men dating an equally horrible white man.
Thanks for making us all collectively dumber for reading that.
You still read it.
I’ll have to avoid reading ten or twelve more times so I don’t get dragged down to your level.
Ah, needlessly dickish and disproportionately rude to a complete stranger over pop culture minutiae.Enjoy that high ground.
Ah, needlessly dickish and disproportionately rude to a complete stranger over pop culture minutiae.Disproportionately rude what, exactly? Missed a word there, champ. How many times did you read that post?Anyway: ah, the high-pitched whining of a chud who tried to deliver a copy-pasted zinger to a stranger on the internet and got it smacked back and is now crying about how he doesn’t like it. And he can’t grasp the irony.Enjoy that high ground.It’s cute you think people like me need your permission to do anything. And is the high ground enjoyable? Well, you’ll never know.
Yeah, that’s what happened here…
That’s a fascinating but also almost insanely fucked up, most of the time I feel a certain amount of guilt that now I’m in the my late forties I’ve pretty much lost touch with 99% of modern music (though their are exceptions like the New Zealand comedian / singer Paul Williams, and I thought Wet Leg’s debut was great) but I think I can happily ignore Doja Cat now without ever having heard her a single song by her.
TL;DR version. She is basically an internet troll that can rap. Pissing people off is what she does. Probably best we collectively just ignore her
Sigh. The internet was a mistake.
Fuck can I just put on “Say So” and pretend none of this is happening?
I mostly know her from her being on the show Dave, where she dates Dave. It was a pretty good ep.
(She’s black… let her therapist handle that.)Ah, this is where the one-drop rule is beating y’all’s asses. Yeah, her dad’s black and she’s not light enough to pass, but the reality is that she is a light-skinned mixed woman estranged from her black father and raised by her white mother in (92% white) Oak Park, California, so I was decidedly unsurprised to learn of Doja’s hatred of black men (which necessarily involves self-hatred) and willingness to cape for white men in racist chat rooms.
That was a lot to process…
Eh, would be more impactful if the song was any good
‘It samples a good song.’ — Modern music criticism 101
I like a lot of Doja Cat songs, this one just isn’t very good.
“Bitch, I’m a possessed cow.”
Nicknames are mostly harmless fun, but the fact that every group has to have one, as though each species of fish needs to have its own clever collective noun, is obnoxious. It used to be just the stoners and the metalheads who did it, and even then I can only think of a few bands before 2010 or so that had groupie names. Now even just wanting to bone an actor makes you a Cumberbitch or something.
I don’t blame her for not knowing how to navigate stan culture, since stan culture is basically all the worst parts of celebrity pushed way past 11. It’s hard to even follow the throughline between Eminem singing a song two decades ago about a fan who’s obsessive and parasocial literally going crazy and killing himself, to the present where millions of people will just openly admit to stanning people and genuinely mean it in that exact way. I mean, it’s no harder to follow than a dozen other things that have happened over the past twenty years I guess, but almost every aspect of modern society makes me think like somehow I’ve lost my mind.
If I were to want to harm an actor, would that make me a Cumberbash?
If we were to all line up to do so, would that make a queue Cumber?
I just want a sweet pastry baked in the shape of an actor. A Cumberbun, if you will.
My concern is that once a fan base has a name, it becomes an identity and that identity and the source of it has to always be defended, right or wrong. It just seems to make things even more toxic.
Oh so THAT’S a Doja Cat.
Not to be confused with Doha cats:
Or dojo cats.
STILL WAITING ON THAT NOSTALGIA-MINING REBOOT, HOLLYWOOD.
WHO DO YOU CALL WHEN YOU WANT SOME PEPPERONI?
They’re stampin’ out crime, and you know that ain’t baloney!
What a hateful little untalented hack she is.
What kind of a “music journalist”— fawns over Doja KKKat this hard?Oh, yeah, one who was a barista last year. 😀 😀
Anyone listening to this drivel unironically needs to grow up.
I see a red door and I want to paint it Cat
This is catchy af and I love it. The visuals are mesmerizing and the story is a fantastical trip into whatever sin she’s cooking up. I’m in. I got tired of the braggadocio of male rappers, but I adore the way most women rappers floss because they’ve earned it. It’s your time and you’re welcome to take charge. I see alot of commenters running her down for the silliest of reasons, if they even have actual reasons. A lot of one-sentence “I don’t like it” grumbling. Why you mad? Her physical perfection doesn’t leave me envious, just hopeful that she gets everything out of it while she can because people want to worship it, so keep making art and get paid.
Love the very first images – “I see you. The gaze is all mine.” Also reminiscent of The Seventh Seal, for me. She isn’t going to leave anyone unscathed, lol.